F# 1.0.8 released (includes updates for use with Visual Studio 2005 Beta2)

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F# is a research project from Microsoft Research. It is not a Microsoft product. All opinions are my own. All content is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

F# 1.0.8.6 is now available at research.microsoft.com/downloads.  This release is primarily an update to match Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2, though F# can also continue to be used with Visual Studio 2003.  The release also includes a number of bug-fixes and fills in some of the corners in functionality that were missing from previous releases, particularly with regard to constrained polymorphism.  This is documented in the README-fsharp.html that comes with the release, and the known issues with this release are listed below.

Have fun!

Known Issues

VS 2005 Beta 2: devenv.exe displays a dialog box about "background thread calls" when running from an account other than the one used to install F#. This is due to a bug in Visual Studio, exposed by any Visual Studio plugins based on the Babel package. Workaround: Select "Always allow background thread call" and continue.

VS 2003. Cannot open sample solution files in VS 2003. Workaround: open the sample project (.fsharpp) files instead.

VS 2003: When running FsVsPackageInstall.msi, it begins installation procedure but raise next error "Module C:\fsharp\bin\FsLangService.dll failed to register. HRESULT -2147024894. Contact your support personnel. [Exit Installation] [Try Again] [Continue]." Check that you set the FSHARP_TARGET_VS_VER environment variable to 7.1, as described in the installation notes

VS 2003: Double-clicking on a file doesn't open the file - instead error is shown. Diagnosis: The installer associates the file types with VS 2005, regardless of whether you are installing for VS 2003 or not. Workaround: Go to Control Panel -> Folder Options -> File Types and modify “FS”, “FSI”, “ML” and “MLI” to open with VS 2003. Do this by unselecting "DDE" from the "Advanced options" and changing the open action to the appropriate path, e.g. "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" "%1"   

All versions: The warning "This and other recursive references within..." appears when building some samples. These are just letting you know that the code is using mutually-referential objects (value recursion). Use --no-warn 40 to ignore these. The program will run correctly.