{"id":4981,"date":"2015-12-03T11:22:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-03T11:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/dotnet\/2015\/12\/03\/guest-post-announcing-f-support-in-visual-studio-code-with-ionide\/"},"modified":"2021-09-30T14:00:31","modified_gmt":"2021-09-30T21:00:31","slug":"guest-post-announcing-f-support-in-visual-studio-code-with-ionide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/dotnet\/guest-post-announcing-f-support-in-visual-studio-code-with-ionide\/","title":{"rendered":"[Guest Post] Announcing F# Support in Visual Studio Code with Ionide"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a guest post by Krzysztof Cieślak<\/a>, an F# community developer and contributor to the Ionide project including its Visual Studio Code extension. To learn more about F# and engage with the community, head to fsharp.org<\/a>. To learn more about the Ionide project, head to ionide.io<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ionide<\/a> is a suite of packages for the Atom<\/a> editor that aims to provide a fully-featured, modern, cross-platform, open-source IDE for F# development. It’s available via download using the Atom Package Manager.<\/p>\n

At Connect, we announced the release of a set of Ionide extensions for Visual Studio Code<\/a>, adding F#, Paket and FAKE support to this newly open-sourced, cross-platform editor.<\/p>\n

What is Ionide?<\/h2>\n

Ionide provides the option of a lightweight cross-platform editor for programmers who don’t want to rely on Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio for every project. While both are full-featured IDEs with great F# support – much better in terms of plain language support features – there are many programmers, especially those coming from a functional programming background, who prefer a different style of tools.<\/p>\n

Another important feature of the Ionide project is its integration with popular tools used by the F# community – such as Paket<\/a> (alternative NuGet client), FAKE<\/a> (F# Make), and the F# Yeoman generator. Ionide enables developers to use this unique, integrated, open source tooling workflow from the comfort of their editor.<\/p>\n

Ionide is an eight month-old project with almost 500 commits, 120 versioned releases, and 13 contributors for the core Atom F# support plugin. And now, we’re excited to start a new pillar of the Ionide project – Ionide for Visual Studio Code.<\/p>\n

Ionide for Visual Studio Code<\/h2>\n

Visual Studio Code is new, cross-platform text editor created by Microsoft that combines the streamlined UI of a modern editor with rich code assistance and navigation, and an integrated debugging experience – without the need for a full IDE. As such, it has an aim similar to the Ionide project, and the decision to create a set of Visual Studio Code plug-ins was simple and natural.<\/p>\n

How to start<\/h3>\n

Ionide plugins for Visual Studio Code can be installed using the new Visual Studio Code extension gallery<\/a> – Ionide-fsharp<\/a> is one of the featured extensions there, and there are also individual plugins for Paket<\/a> and FAKE<\/a>.<\/p>\n

F# support<\/h3>\n

Ionide-fsharp provides an F# IDE-like experience in Visual Studio Code, with features like<\/p>\n