Introduction of F# in .net framework, what is F# how to use

Introduction of F# in .net framework:

F# is a typed functional language, by which I mean that types of all values are determined during the compile-time.

Functional programming has long been popular with computer scientists and academia, but pure functional languages like Lisp and Haskell are often considered unworkable for real-world software development. One common complaint is that functional-style code can be difficult to integrate with code and libraries written in imperative languages like C++ and Java.

Enter F# (pronounced "F-sharp"), a Microsoft language designed to be both functional and practical. Because F# is a first-class language on the .Net Common Language Run time (CLR), it can access all of the same libraries and features as other CLR languages, such as C# and Visual Basic.

what is F# how to use:

For example, numeric data types in F# can be assigned units of measure to aid scientific computation. F# also offers constructs to aid asynchronous I/O, CPU palatalization, and off-loading processing to the GPU.

After a long gestation period at Microsoft Research, F# now ships with Visual Studio 2010. Better still, in an unusual move, Microsoft has made the F# compiler and core library available under the Apache open source license; you can start working with it for free and even use it on Mac and Linux systems

Key benefits of F# compared with C#

If you are already familiar with C# or Java, you might be wondering why it would be worth learning yet another language. F# has some major benefits which I have grouped under the following themes:

Conciseness: F# is not cluttered up with coding "noise" such as curly brackets, semicolons and so on. You almost never have to specify the type of an object, thanks to a powerful type inference system. And it generally takes less lines of code to solve the same problem.
Convenience: Many common programming tasks are much simpler in F#. This includes things like creating and using complex type definitions, doing list processing, comparison and equality, state machines, and much more. And because functions are first class objects, it is very easy to create powerful and reusable code by creating functions that have other functions as parameters, or that combine existing functions to create new functionality.
Correctness: F# has a very powerful type system which prevents many common errors such as null reference exceptions. And in addition, you can often encode business logic using the type system itself, so that it is actually impossible to write incorrect code, because it is caught at compile time as a type error.
Concurrency: F# has a number of built-in tools and libraries to help with programming systems when more than one thing at a time is happening. Asynchronous programming is directly supported, as is parallelism. F# also has a message queuing system, and excellent support for event handling and reactive programming. And because data structures are immutable by default, sharing state and avoiding locks is much easier.
Completeness: Although it is a functional language at heart, it does support other styles which are not 100% pure, which makes it much easier to interact with the non-pure world of web sites, databases, other applications, and so on. In particular, F# is designed as a hybrid functional/OOPs language, so it can do almost everything that C# can do as well. Of course, F# integrates seamlessly with the .NET ecosystem, which gives you access to all the third party .NET libraries and tools. Finally, it is part of Visual Studio, which means you get a good editor with Intelligent support, a debugger, and many plugging for unit tests, source control, and other development tasks.

In the rest of this series of posts, I will try to demonstrate each of these F# benefits, using standalone snippets of F# code (and often with C# code for comparison). I'll briefly cover all the major features of F#, including pattern matching, function composition, and concurrent programming. By the time you have finished this series, I hope that you will have been impressed with the power and elegance of F#, and you will be encouraged to use it for your next project.

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