Setting up the IDE

As developers, we love our IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) and Visual Studio.NET is probably the best IDE for .NET development; no offense to eclipse bloatware Luna. From the open source perspective, there has been a recent major development in making the .NET framework available as open source and on Mac and Linux platforms. Microsoft announced a pre-release of F# 4.0 in Visual Studio 2015 Preview and it will be available as part of the full release.

To install and run F#, there are various options available for all platforms, sizes, and budgets. For those with a fear of commitments, there is the online interactive version of TryFsharp at http://www.tryfsharp.org/ where you can code in the browser.

For Windows users, you have a few options. Until VS.NET 2015 comes out, you can try out the freely available Visual Studio Community 2013 or a Visual Studio 2013 trial edition, with trial being the keyword. The trial editions include Ultimate, Premium, and Professional versions. The free community edition IDE can be downloaded from https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/vs2013-community-vs.aspx and the trial editions can be downloaded from http://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs.

Alternatively, there are express editions available at no cost. Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop Web editions can be downloaded from http://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs#d-express-windows-desktop.

F# support is built into Visual Studio; the Visual F# tools package the latest updates to the F# compiler: interactive, runtime, and Visual Studio integration. F# support comes with Visual Studio. However, the F# team releases regular updates in the form of F# tools. The tools can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44011.

The F# tools contain the F# command-line compiler (fsc.exe) and F# Interactive (fsi.exe), which are the easiest way to get started with F#. The fsi.exe compiler can be found in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\F#\<version>\Framework\<version>\.

The <version> placeholder in the preceding path is substituted by your .NET version installed. If you just want to use the F# compiler and tools from the command line, you can download the .NET framework 4.5 or above from https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=30653. You will also need the Windows SDK for associated dependencies, which can be downloaded from http://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/desktop/bg162891.

Alternatively, Tsunami is the free IDE for F# that you can download from http://tsunami.io/download.html and use to build applications. CloudSharper by IntelliFactory is in beta but shows promise as a web-based IDE. For more information regarding CloudSharper, refer to http://cloudsharper.com/.

In this book, we will be using Visual Studio 2013 Professional Edition and FSI (F# interactive) but you can either use the trial or Express edition, or the FSI command line to run the examples and exercises.