This will be the second part of a series of 3 articles that will help you to get up and running to do F# development with .NET Core on Linux.
- Part I: Installation
- Part II: Development environment
- Part III: “Hello World” and debugging
Ok, for this particular entry we’ll be talking about tools that’ll improve our development experience.
State of the art
Unfortunately, one of the downsides of not developing on Windows is not having access to the excellent Visual Studio IDE but fear not, we’ll be covering a setup that should make us feel at home. Today’s post will focus on Visual Studio Code (vscode), a fantastic open source code editor developed by Microsoft. Sometime in the future we’ll be covering alternative tools, such as the promising Jetbrains Rider IDE and VIM/Emacs.
Now head onto vscode’s download page and install the package corresponding to your favorite distro (both deb and rpm as well as 32 and 64 bits packages are provided).
If you’ve been following our previous entry, you should have a folder fsharp_tutorial , go ahead and open it.
Extensions
The vscode extensions ecosystem is huge and worth spending some time looking at what it has to offer. For the scope of this series, we’ll only be covering one: ionide-fsharp . This extension comes to us thanks to the people at ionide and on top of the one that we’ll be looking at, they provide two more excellent F# extensions that you should check out.
Go ahead and install it, you’ll be prompted to reload the current window to enable it. If you search for it again, you should see something like this
While the out of the box settings should be enough to get you started if you wanted to change something you can find the extension settings under ‘FSharp configuration’ or by searching ‘fsharp’ in the settings page.
Taking it for a ride
We’ll go over a few things now, so open up our Program.fs file.
First thing we want to do is to add our add function that we used to test F# interactive on our previous post. Assuming things are working as intended, the first thing you should notice is the automatic function type signature displaying on top of our function.
The second thing now will be to test the integration with F# interactive. We can do this in several different way but for this post we’ll use the default ‘send line to fsi’ shortcut which is alt+/ .
Now your function is part of the interactive tool context and can be run.
You can find the rest of the options by opening up quick search (ctrl+shift+p ) and searching for fsi .
On the next and final entry for the series, we’ll finish setting vscode for building, running and debugging our program.
