F# and Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition?

Question

Is there any way to work with F# on Visual Studio 2010 Expression Edition. I am having Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition Beta 2.

Answer 1

While F# is not included in VS2010 Express, it appears to be supported in VS2012 Express Web Edition.

Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web ... is a free development environment that programmers can use to build projects such as ASP.NET applications and Windows Azure cloud services. This F# Tools release adds in F# 3.0 components, such as the F# 3.0 compiler, F# Interactive, IDE support, and new F# features such as type providers and query expressions.

- MSDN

Answer 2

Unfortunately, there are no plans to include an F# Express edition for Visual Studio 2010. The express editions for 2010 are:

• Visual Basic 2010 Express
• Visual Web Developer 2010 Express
• Visual C# 2010 Express
• Visual C++ 2010 Express

Source of above.

Answer 3

There won't be Visual F# Express but you can use the free Visual Studio Shell (wich is available for 2008 and 2010) with F#. It works perfectly for 2008 but I have not tested it with 2010.

Update:

The release of F# 2.0 works with the 2010 Integrated shell as well; see Don Syme's blog post "Announcing the F# 2.0 Free Tools Update".

Update: Visual F# tools 3.1.1 now support VS Express for Desktop and VS Express for Web