Regions and navigation bar for F# in Visual Studio

The beginning of a new year may be a good time for writing one lightweight blog post that I wanted to publish for some time now. During my last internship with the F# team at MSR, I did some work on improving the F# IntelliSense in Visual Studio. This mostly involved the usual features - automatic completion, colouring and tooltips. The F# IntelliSense in Visual Studio 2010 still isn't perfect, but I think it is safe to claim that it is the best IDE experience for a typed functional programming language (aside, you can vote for some F# IDE features here and here).

F# community on GitHub & MonoDevelop update

When I talked with Miguel de Icaza and Michael Hutchinson at the F# in Education workshop some time ago, someone mentioned that it would be nice to have a clone of the official F# code drop that could accept patches from the community. I also talked with Michael about GitHub and I think I finally understood why everybody uses it today. I said to myself that I'll need to take a look at it when I'll have a bit of time... After coming back from the workshop, I was quite busy getting the F# plugin for MonoDevelop out, but after I wrote about it, I finally found some time to look at GitHub.

I really like the way Mono team uses GitHub. They have a single "mono" organization that is owned by several people from the Mono community and all important projects that are parts of Mono have their repository as part of the "mono" organization. Thanks to GitHub, everyone can easily clone the repository, do some changes and submit a "pull request" to the main repository.

I thought that the F# community could follow the same model, so I started the F# community organization on GitHub...

F# in MonoDevelop and cross-platform web sites & screencasts

About a week ago, I attended the F# in Education workshop in Boston. It was a great event with many interesting people around. I believe that the workshop was very exciting for everyone who is interested in F#, but uses Mac or Linux. The F# team recently made some effort to improve the F# support on Mono (meaning mainly Mac and Linux). The recent November 2010 CTP update contains several bugfixes that make it possible to use F# on Mono 2.8. Another great thing that happened at the workshop is the open source release of F# (see also blog post by Miguel with a post-check-in photo). At the workshop, I also announced my contribution to the cross-platform F# story, a project that I've been working on recently - the F# language binding for MonoDevelop.

Click here for a larger screenshot

I promised to make it available as soon as possible after the workshop. As usually, things take longer, than one would like, but I'm finally ready to announce the initial (beta) version of the plugin. The screenshot on the right shows some of the features of the F# language binding. As you can see, there is an F# Interactive tool window, syntax highlighting as well as IntelliSense auto-completion.

If you're interested in trying it out, here are links to the repository (you can use it to install the language binding from the MonoDevelop Add-ins manager) and source code. The F# plugin needs to be able to locate F# installation and it also requires more F# assemblies to be installed in the GAC, so you may as well want to read the instructions before trying it :-).

• Project homepage at the Functional Variations web site has more information about the project as well as detailed installation instructions.
• I also created a web page that contains information about installing F# on Mac and Linux which explains how to install F#, such that the MonoDevelop plugin can find it.
• The source code is available in the F# cross-platform packages and samples project at CodePlex (under the Apache 2.0 license). You can find it in the monodevelop subdirectory.
• Online repositiory with a MonoDevelop package is available at: http://functional-variations.net/addin.
  (If you're a hacker, the easiest way to get it working is to add FSharp.Compiler* to GAC and set FSHARP_COMPILER_BIN environment variable to F# installation location)

If you want to see some interesting uses of the F# MonoDevelop plugin, you can also watch my talk at the F# in Education event. In one demo, I used F# on Mac to play with a simple, composable functional 3D library. In another example I demonstrated how to asynchronously process stock prices on Linux. The last demo, showing my match! extension didn't work all that well, because I had too many virtual machines running, but I'll blog about match! again sooner or later!

In addition to the F# plugin for MonoDevelop itself, I'd also like to mention two web sites that I've been working on and some interesting cross-platform F# screencasts...

New Version of Phalanger with Silverlight and VS 2008 Support

At the Lang.NET Symposium I presented several new features in Phalanger. I already posted the presentation and samples on the blog (here) and the talk is also available as a video on the Lang.NET web site (here - actually, due to the huge demand the site is down now, but I hope it gets back soon!) Anyway, the most interesting thing is that I've used Phalanger Integration for Visual Studio 2008 during the talk, which wasn't available in any Phalanger release until now.

I have to mention one more thing before talking more about the new release - Phalanger Integration for VS 2008 works with Visual Studio Shell, which means that you can get Visual Studio 2008 with Phalanger Support for free! Yes, that's right. Microsoft offers so called Visual Studio 2008 Shell, which is an "empty" IDE with no integrated languages and you can install Phalanger Integration into this version, which means that you can get very good Phalanger IDE (for Windows) for no cost at all!

If you can't wait to install this new version, you can skip the overview article and go directly to the installation links.

Phalanger at Lang.NET Symposium

Last week I attended the Lang.NET Symposium and I also did a short presentation about Phalanger (below you can find the demos and slides from my talk). By the way – during the trip from Prague to Seattle I missed a connecting flight from Paris, so I had one day to visit Paris and since I was traveling on Saturday I actually quite enjoyed it :-), so that’s where the picture comes from.

Overall it was really a fantastic event with many great talks from many interesting people. I hope that there will be recordings as a last year, so I won’t comment every topic that I found interesting (that would be really a long post). But just quickly – people from Microsoft often talked about DLR (dynamic language runtime) related topics, which was interesting as we’re planning to look at DLR in Phalanger. Luckily, Wez Furlong from the PHP community was there too, so we discussed how we could work on “PHP on DLR” project together (see also our mailing list).

There were also two talks about F# (from Luke Hoban and Harry Pierson), and it was a lot of fun to hang out with them. Finally, Erik Meijer presented the Volta project, which I was particularly interested in as it shares many goals and ideas with my F# Web Tools.

Non-Microsoft talks covered wider range of topics including Mono and Moonlight project (by Miguel de Icaza) and I actually had a chance to talk with Miguel about Phalanger and we even tried running the Helicopter sample on Moonlight – there were some issues, but it seems quite promising, so I hope to have the sample running on Moonlight on Linux quite soon! Miguel mentioned that the installation of Moonlight is currently a bit painful (due to some issues with media codecs), but it should be fixed in next few weeks, so I hope to be able to try it on my machine too!

A few notes about Phalanger future

First, I'd like to aplogoize for the lack of new about the Phalanger project recently. I spent some time working as an intern with the F# team in MSR Cambridge and I also had final bachelor exam this autumn. Anyway, this doesn't mean that there isn't anything new and interesting regarding the Phalanger project comming soon - actually (as I believe) the opposite is true! The topics that I'm going to further discuss in this article is our upcomming support for Silverlight platform, the relation between Phalanger and DLR and also our desire to make Phalanger more open to the community, so stay tuned!

Phalanger has a new website!

As you may know, I became new project lead for the Phalanger project [^]. Phalanger was started as a project at Charles University (where I'm studying) by Tomas Matousek, Ladislav Prosek and 4 other guys, the first version was very successful and they started wokring on the second version which introduces PHP in the family of first-class .NET languages (which makes it fully interoperable with the rest of .NET world). After releasing the second version, Tomas and Ladislav moved to Microsoft and convinced me to continue in the Phalanger development. Most of the work on the 2.0 version was already done, so we're currently working on implementing the rest of the PHP/CLR language extensions, making Phalanger more compatible with existing PHP apps and so on. For more information about the history of Phalanger visit the project history page [^].

I think that Phalanger is in the phase when it can be very interesting for both PHP and .NET communities, but it never got greater publicity and there are not very much examples and articles to demonstrate the interesting Phalanger features. To improve this we started working on the new Phalanger website where users could share their experiences, tips etc. We used PHP wiki called DokuWiki [^] (running, of course on Phalanger) and you can find the new website here:

• Phalanger - Homepage [^] (the new project homepage)
• Phalanger - User wiki [^] (you can edit pages in user wiki after logging in)

I also wrote two articles about Phalanger (and I'm working on more :-)) to explain the most important and interesting Phalanger features and concepts. You can find the articles at our web:

• Phalanger for .NET developers [^] - focused on .NET interoperability and features interesting for C# developers
• Phalanger for Mono users [^] - Phalanger 2.0 supports Mono, so here is an introduction for Mono users

I'll also continue blogging about Phalanger, so you can expect more information about Phalanger, problems that we're currently solving as well as some other tips, tricks in this blog. If you're interested only in Phalanger you can use this RSS feed to monitor new articles in this blog (it shows only articles with the Phalanger tag).

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