F# Improvements in Xamarin Studio

With the (almost) stable release of Xamarin Studio 6 comes a ton of great new improvements. I absolutely love the new dark theme! However, some huge improvements were made to the IDE for F# support, as well. Improvements that I feel may have gone without much notice. So I wanted to help get those improvements out in the open more as well as to recognize the folks that made all of this happen. At the time of this writing, I’m running the alpha build (v6.1) of Xamarin Studio.

Speaking of recognizing folks, huge shout out to Dave Thomas and Jason Imison for all their hard work in getting these improvements into Xamarin Studio. F# in Xamarin Studio would be nothing without these guys.

Project Templates

Xamarin Studio 6 now includes project templates for Xamarin Forms in F#. This is a pretty big update since, before, you couldn’t even add a PCL project in F# in Xamarin Studio.

F# Xamarin Forms Project

With this you can start creating cross-platform mobile applications with Xamarin Forms in F#! While this was doable before, it is much easier without going through a few workarounds to get things working. Just select this project and the templates do everything for you. We’ll actually go over this part in more detail in a future post, but for now just know that this is now possible.

F# Interactive

There has been a ton of improvement in the F# interactive in Xamarin Studio. A few big things are included: syntax highlighting, intellisense within the interactive window, and tool tips.

These improvements will definitely make testing our F# code in the interactive window much easier. Here’s a quick look at it in action:

F# Interactive Gif


This is definitely a great time to be an F# developer. With tools like Xamarin Studio making it much more pleasant of an experience to use the language, especially on the Mac, I hope it can help drive a lot more C# developers to at least give F# more of a chance and to experiment more with the language. I can’t wait to see what these guys bring us in future releases of Xamarin Studio.

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