What's New in Visual Studio 2017 for F# For Developers

Get a quick—yet thorough—tour of the new features and tools available in Visual Studio 2017 and F# 4.1.

Visual Studio 2017 marks an important point in the history of F# and Visual Studio. For the first time, open-source developers have made a major contribution both to the language and to the tools directly available in Visual Studio. In this course, get a quick—yet thorough—tour of the new features and tools available in Visual Studio 2017 and F# 4.1.

Kit Eason discusses the new value types that provide an opportunity for performance gains, the new result type which gives you access to the railway oriented programming style of error handling, and program organization and readability changes. Plus, he explores the evolution of tooling for F#, and explains how F# tooling has changed in Visual Studio 2017. To wrap up the course, he shares how you can contribute to the F# language and tooling by getting involved in the open-source community.

Introduction

• Welcome
• What you should know
• Exercise files

1. Value Storage Changes

• Struct tuples
• Struct records
• Struct unions
• The "fixed" keyword
• Byref Returns

2. The Result Type and Railway Oriented Programming

• The "result" type
• Result type functions and railway oriented programming

3. Program Organization Changes

• Mutually referential types and modules
• Implicit module suffix
• Caller info

4. Readability Changes

• Underscores in numeric literals
• Error message improvements

5. Visual Studio 2017 and F# 4.1

• The past and future of visual F# tooling in Visual Studio
• Tooling
• Contributing to F# and its tooling

Conclusion

• Next steps, other courses, and summary