Lesson 1. The Visual Studio experience
I’m assuming that as a C# or VB .NET developer, you’re already familiar with Visual Studio (VS). In this book, you’ll be using Visual Studio 2015 (VS2015) and F# 4 (which is included with VS2015). This lesson covers how to ensure that your installation of VS contains everything needed for the remainder of the book so that you’re on a level playing field with me, and we can dive straight into F#! We’ll look at the following:
- Installing Visual Studio with F#
- Downloading F# extensions for Visual Studio 2015
- Configuring Visual Studio 2015 for use with F#
If you’ve already used F#, you might feel the need to skip this lesson. I advise you to at least quickly skim through it to ensure that you’re working from the same baseline as I am to avoid any confusion later.
First, if you don’t have VS2015, don’t worry. Since VS2015, Microsoft has released a free-to-use version known as VS2015 Community Edition. This version is completely usable for the purposes of this book, and if you don’t have it, I encourage you to download it now from www.visualstudio.com.