Soma on F#

Soma announced some exciting news this morning. Developer Division--the people at Microsoft who make Visual Studio--is partnering with Microsoft Research on F#. We're going to fully integrate F# into Visual Studio:

“This is one of the best things that has happened at Microsoft ever since we created Microsoft Research over 15 years ago.  Here is another great example of technology transfer at work.  We will be partnering with Don Syme and others in Microsoft Research to fully integrate the F# language into Visual Studio and continue innovating and evolving F#.”

Don Syme and his team work out of Cambridge. Over the past few weeks we've been busily spinning up a team in Redmond to work with them. As its stands today, the team looks like this:

Cambridge: Don Syme (does everything), James Margetson (development) and Ralf Herbrich (development)

Redmond: Luke Hoban (PM), Me (development)

Of course we'll add more people over the next weeks and months. Critically, we still need to build the test organization.

The C# Product Unit is sponsoring the partnership and for the foreseeable future Luke and I will continue to work in the C# organization. I think this is a strong match because the C# org, as you probably expect, has a deep relationship with the other parts of Microsoft that will be important going forward: Parallel Fx (PFx), the CLR team, and so forth. We also have Anders Hejlsberg.

F# is a language that makes it easy to make beautiful, concise code. I'm excited to be part of getting it into people's hands.

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