F# September 2008 CTP Released

Last October, I blogged about our increased investment in the F# programming language. Functional programming has been an increasingly important trend in programming languages over the recent years. F#, a functional programming language for the .NET platform, combines the strengths of functional programming with the breadth of frameworks and tools available with .NET and Visual Studio.

Last week, the F# team released the F# September 2008 CTP. This release marks an important step along the path we laid out in October to integrate the F# language into Visual Studio, and to continue innovating and evolving F#. Here’s a taste of what’s new with this release of F#:

· Broadly improved Visual Studio 2008 integration, which allows F# users to scale from scripting and explorative development up to large-scale component and application design - all within Visual Studio

· Improvements to the F# language and libraries to make them simpler and more regular

· An exciting new language feature, Units of Measure, which extends F#’s inference and strong typing to floating point data

Along with the CTP, we also launched a new F# Developer Center on MSDN. This developer center provides resources for F# developers and links to F# user communities.

The F# September CTP is available here.

Namaste!