Announcing the F# February 2010 Release

[ NOTE: Please uninstall any older version of F# before installing VS 2010 RC. If you don't, you will need to uninstall everything, then reinstall ]

[ NOTE: Please uninstall Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 before installing F# ]

I’m very pleased to announce the February 2010 release of the F# language  This release of F# is available as part of:

  •   The RC release of Visual Studio 2010
  •   The matching MSI for use with Visual Studio 2008, .NET 2.0 and Silverlight
  •   The matching ZIP of standalone compiler binaries, for use on .NET, Mono (Linux/Mac/Windows) and other CLI implementations

As expected, this is very much a stabilization release as it marks the near-final step on the road to Visual Studio 2010 RTM, with F# integrated in the Visual Studio product.

However, in one small way, this release also represents a culmination of 4 years of development of the F# language:  in this release the F# “language” version number has been incremented to 2.0.  The four years we’ve worked on F# 1.x has seen the addition of the many things that make F# special as a programming language on top of its functional programming base: objects, active patterns, sequence expressions, asynchronous computations, constructs for parallelism, many refinements to the library, F# Interactive, and huge improvements in tooling, intellisense, project system and debugging. We’re glad to be continuing these improvements with this release, and, above all, giving people the base they need to enjoy long and productive use of F#.

Today, we are also very excited to be releasing the F# Power Pack on CodePlex under the Microsoft Public License. The F# Power Pack is a set of additional tools and utilities provided by the F# team, which will grow and evolve separately from the stable core F# releases. For more information see the F# Power Pack site on codeplex.

As the focus for this release of F# has been stability, there are only minor F# language additions since the October 2009 release.  The changes are described in the detailed release notes.  In the F# library, there have also been only minor additions since the October 2009 release.  Some constructs deprecated in previous releases have now been removed.  When porting older F# code (pre-Beta2) to the newest F# release, it is highly recommended that you migrate first to the October 2009 release, so that the useful deprecation warnings are available.  When migrating from the October 2009 release, please first ensure your code is “clean” with regard to the deprecation warnings given in that release.

Thanks yet again for all the excellent feedback you’ve provided throughout the development of the F# 1.x releases.