Your first F# project

Going through installation screens and showing how to click Next would be discourteous to our reader's intelligence. Therefore we will skip step-by-step installation for other more verbose texts. Let's start with our first F# project in Visual Studio.

In the preceding screenshot, you can see the F# interactive window at the bottom. Here we have selected FILE | New | Project because we are attempting to open a new project of F# type. There are a few project types available, including console applications and F# library. For ease of explanation, let's begin with a Console Application as shown in the next screenshot:

Alternatively, from within Visual Studio, we can use FSharp Interactive. FSharp Interactive (FSI) is an effective tool for testing out your code quickly. You can open the FSI window by selecting View | Other Windows | F# Interactive from the Visual Studio IDE as shown in the next screenshot:

FSI lets you run code from a console which is similar to a shell. You can access the FSI executable directly from the location at c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\F#\<version>\Framework\<version>\.

FSI maintains session context, which means that the constructs created earlier in the FSI are still available in the later parts of code.

The FsiAnyCPU.exe executable file is the 64-bit counterpart of F# interactive; Visual Studio determines which executable to use based on the machine's architecture being either 32-bit or 64-bit. You can also change the F# interactive parameters and settings from the Options dialog as shown in the following screenshot: