Sometimes you get so upset about something you need to blog about it, and ranting on Twitter, Facebook and Channel 9 comments just did not quite seem enough.

The insult, and the injury

I watched a Channel 9 talk about the “future of C# and VB” by Jay Schmeltzer from DEVintersection where he went over the future of the .NET stack, and started out by looking over the Stack Overflow statistics of programming languages that I have addressed before. He showed the graph of Most Popular Technologies showing C# placed prominently fourth behind Java, SQL and JavaScript, then Jay showed the category Most Loved languages, where Microsoft  have a runaway hit with F# on third place, and then C# way down on 10th place. Obviously, VB was right on top of the Most Feared, but that you knew already. Jay expressed much pride in having C# all the way up on 10th of most loved languages and then said “and we have Microsoft’s F# up here on 3rd, but that is of course more of a … well,  C# is of course mainstream in a different way”. So in other words, not even a pretence that F# is a first class citizen in .NET.

Contrast with Apple. From almost single handed creating Objective C into something that is in existence and popular despite the crushing superiority in funding and mindshare of C++ – Apple basically told everybody that (the F# clone) Swift is it from now on. They basically did a VB6 -> C# sort of story, telling everybody that they were welcome to use that old stuff but they really should get on board with the modern technologies.

Contrast that with the above statement from top brass at Microsoft.

So basically, in this blog I am trying to collect ways which a dark matter C# developer can just start using F# today thanks to the extremely ambitious efforts of the friendly and hard-working F# community, and show to the extreme extent Microsoft isn’t bothering at all – ignoring the goldmine they are sitting on. I’m trying to find ways which make things easier for existing Microsoft-focused developers, so I will be collating the things you can use to go F# today for the crummy ASP.NET LOB apps that make up the bread and butter of the C# world.

The comeback

My goal is providing ways which you can go F# today, and immediately write less code with fewer bugs that do the things your C# code does today. You will eventually discover cooler things, like package management using Paket (wich support Nuget package streams and maintaining dependencies directly from GitHub or similar) amd the very F# web framework Suave.io and using FAKE as a build system rather than MSBuild, which helps if you have complex builds where you would like to not mess with XML and rather read F# code. You may perhaps find other ways to persist data that are more natural to use in F# and you will have little problem learning them once you get over the hump, but just to make the barrier to entry extremely low, let’s keep things familiar and non-scary. The things that would come for free if Microsoft had devoted more than a fraction of means towards F# in Visual Studio is the templating that makes C# so easy to use when creating websites and web services. To achieve that ease-of-use we have to rely on the community, and they have despite the odds come up with a few competitive options over the years. I have compiled these on my F# for C# people page which I hope to keep updated.