Toward a Visual F# 4.0 release

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To the Visual F# Tools development community –

Over the past months, we have made an impressive amount of progress together on F# 4.0 and the next version of the Visual F# Tools.  There is still plenty of work remaining here.

With the goal of shipping a high-quality, enterprise-grade F# language and toolchain in Visual Studio 2015, it’s come time to wind down new feature development for F# 4.0, and start focusing our efforts on quality validation and stabilization.

We plan to use the following schedule as the roadmap to releasing 4.0:

12/8/2014 – Last day for feature-level PRs to be submitted.  
12/19/2014 – Submitted feature PRs have been given initial review and are either approved or cut for F# 4.0.  Iteration and fixups of approved PRs continues past this date.   
1/9/2015 – Approved feature PRs are complete and integrated. Visual F# Tools 4.0 is considered “feature complete.”
1/23/2015 – Visual F# Tools 4.0 considered to be at “release candidate” stage.

New PRs containing bug fixes or performance improvements are encouraged throughout this time, though the bar for accepting such changes will naturally rise as we get closer to the end of January.

This is a short runway, and we understand that not everything which was once planned will ready by these dates. Keep in mind that once Visual F# 4.0 ships, we will be releasing regular F# update packages, just as we did with the Visual F# 3.1.1 and 3.1.2 releases.  High-quality features and fixes that didn’t quite make it to F# 4.0 will of course be considered for update releases.

As we lock down feature work over the coming weeks, we call on F# community developers to continue contributing by focusing on quality and testing:

-    Install the VS 2015 Preview and the F# 4.0 preview update and try them out on your own projects
-    File bugs at https://visualfsharp.codeplex.com/
-    Submit fixes for open bugs
-    Review, test, and comment on open PRs

We are looking forward to this last stage of the development cycle, and to an incredible Visual F# Tools 4.0 release next year!