In the past the reasoning to replace the menu system with ribbons completely and not allowing to switch back is the understandable desire to not having to maintain and test two different UIs all the time. Two different ribbons may still work, as the ribbon already has information about "importance" or "prominence" of each item, but I fear eventually there'll be only one remaining in the future.
They are actually using Typescript, and this will lead to less friction wrt hiring devs, supporting all those platforms and integrating web components. Still I would have hoped that MS would be a little more forward thinking, and put some of their MSR tech in good use, to encourage the use of better languages. Just like how Facebook is pushing ReasonML.
I think that the C# focus of .NET is a major mistake holding the platform back, especially when we have languages like F#, Scala, Swift, ReasonML and Rust these days.
How do you know they're doing that? Not that it doesn't make total sense to use TypeScript from any angle I can imagine.
> I think that the C# focus of .NET is a major mistake holding the platform back, especially when we have languages like F#, Scala, Swift, ReasonML and Rust these days.
Yeah F# is really nice, but the IDE support is kinda meh. Also .Net expects you to embrace nil at a lot of points which doesn't gel so nice with F#. But Swift has a worse problem with Objective-C-isms but being a first class citizen really helps as they make a lot of API's really better to use with Swift.
Not wrong, see the Windows 10 OneNote app for example, which already uses Typescript on WinRT/UWP. An Electron target will only be for legacy platforms, like Windows 7 and 8.
It's interesting they're using Electron for Win7/Win8 when React Native for Windows has a WPF rendered that works nicely on Win7 and 8. Perhaps they just found that maintaining two slightly different RN office apps for Windows wasn't worth the effort given the declining market share of the older Windows versions.
That would require Microsoft, the F# team, and the vocal F# community members to actually want F# to be a proper first-class .NET citizen, which sadly isn't the case.
As a sometimes-user of F#, I’m quite happy not caring about a dead-end technology like UWP and .NET Native, thank you very much. I’m glad everyone else seems to agree about that, too.
I run a few things on .NET Core today and it’s great. I’ll probably runs some things in Azure soon enough. I just think UWP has no future because its primary device type (Windows phone) is dead, and it hasn’t seen any uptake in the enterprise to replace Winforms and WPF. F# seems just fine to me, and it’s supported for my app type. Perhaps you need to rethink your choices in development technologies.
All this FUD and hostility from the F# community (including the Fable devs) towards UWP, or anything that's of interest to most Windows and C# developers making the switch, is why F# will never be popular.
And for most people who need to have their code running on anything else than Windows, F# and .NET wouldn't be their first choice anyway, given that there are plenty of better alternatives around, like Haskell, Scala, ReasonML, OCaml etc.
Nothing is being moved. UWP has been here since the dawn of Windows 10, which evolved from WinRT, going back to Windows 8, and is constantly being extended with new APIs.
I've been holding of targeting UWP, until proper F# support.
I have experience with plenty of languages and technologies, including C, C++, Rust, Scala, OCaml, Haskell, Clojure, Elm, Idris, WinForms, WPF, DirectX and dabbled with Silverlight. Migrating from WPF or Silverlight towards UWP shouldn't be a problem.
F# has been my favorite language since 2008, but the hostile anti-UWP, anti-Windows community, compounded with the lack of abstraction features such as ML functors, higher-kinded types, type-classes and terrible modern Windows client support, are driving me away from it.
UWP is pretty mature now and all modern default 1st party Windows apps and critical UI components such as start menu, action center and settings rely on it, and more is being migrated towards it all the time, there is no sign of UWP going away anytime soon.
Except for Windows Phone getting killed, which was the _main_ device type for UWP. The Windows app store is the same graveyard that it was in late 2015 when the announcements around new Windows Phones piqued my curiosity. It looks like that's simply not a thing anymore. I'm betting my money on Xamarin and the browser for a client application, not UWP. There's just no point to it.
UWP is the future of Windows APIs, in case you missed Windows Developer day earlier this month.
So if F# doesn't speak UWP, the community keeps tweeting that GNU/Linux is so much better than Windows, and that we enterprise devs just don't get it, should we bet which of those technologies will last longer on MS roadmap?
My F# code runs on Linux. My client code is migrating to the web and mobile, as is just about every enterprise in the US. Why would I watch Windows developer day?
In some scenario support is more stable, other experimental, other are not supported.
like every technology.
Because budget is not infinite, you need to prioritize.
Just to show you things happened MS tech related to F# and .NET in the last two years:
- .net core
- .net standard (is not the same as .net core)
- new project system for VS
- new .net sdk (that mean work to support these on VS)
- portable pdb
- F# 4.1
- temporary stuff like project.json, who added work and was replaced
- new .net templating
- F# in VS now use roslyn workspaces (yes, that's big)
- integration of VisualF# powertools in default VS extension
- f# bundled in .net sdk and compiler in .net core sdk
- F# on azure notebooks
- F# on azure functions
- VS 2017
- VS 2017 installer (yes, that was annoying)
And that list is just some of MS technologies, who VF# team need to support/adapt too.
NOTE the list doesnt contains things created from community itself, like Fable. and some of these were added by community
Yes, and there is too:
- UWP
- .NET Native
- Corert
but you need to prioritize and choose your (moving) targets.
So ihmo while UWP can be nice to have (ihmo), was put in a lower priority than the others.
When you choose there are lot of factors:
- time to implement
- unknown
- other things open in parallel scenarios
- support needed to complete/make it usable
Community help a lot the F# development, and also a lot the VS VF# extension, see the repo.
Because F# has lot of OSS in the dna.
But that doesnt mean we cannot complain when things need improvements, in some important scenario.
And as a note, the MS VF# project manager was awarded the `F# community Hero award`, that mean the community like and support his work (the award is indipendent and run from community voting)
We don't do Azure and .NET Core is meaningless for us, as it doesn't have GUI support and EF Core is a tiny subset of EF 6.
As consulting company we are not bound to a single language or platform. When we do UNIX projects we use programming languages that are better fit for such platforms, and that isn't .NET Core.
For us .NET only matters for Windows related development, and there F# keeps being the black swan since its early days.
No tooling support for Windows Forms, XAML, Blend, ASP.NET, EF, WCF and now not even .NET Native, because for some strange political reason F# is separated from the .NET development group, and never considered on the decisions of the .NET platform as such.
With C# and VB.NET our customers on Microsoft solutions can be 100% sure their code is safe regardless of what Microsoft thinks to do next, at maximum they would need to re-write parts of it.
To me and many early investors of F# (loyal Windows developers), the current direction is the worst thing that happened to the language.
UWP is not just a nice to have, it's the backbone of client Windows development right now and going forward.
I used to be a huge F# advocate and all the people I converted to F# over the years have left, due to the lacking Windows support. And the VF# program manager siding with anti-UWP, anti-Windows, anti-MS detractors isn't helping the situation.
The main device type for UWP is any Windows 10 device. See the list of benefits mentioned in the link above, which extend beyond phones. I've never owned a Windows Phone, yet I always prefer UWP apps.
Also there is a big market for 2-in-1 tablets, and new small Windows on ARM devices are coming out very soon.
Not every kind of client app is suitable for the browser, especially if you care about performance and deep native platform integration. And I'd rather not deal with JS frameworks when not targeting the web.
Mads Torgerson (the head of the Roslyn project; C#/VB Compiler) showed once a slide, that c# devs are counted in millions, VB devs in 100k steps and F# devs in 10k steps.
F# is a wonderful thing for the ecosystem, but practically of no importance regards priorities.
IMHO: To make UWP and F# a thing, UWP need to be remodeled to a primary react like system. That however will never be a story, considering the state driven UI development MS is doing for decades.
So when they purposefully dismiss F# and say it's just useful for scientific and engineering (with a touch of finance) they find they don't get much adoption from general business developers?
F#, even if used as a better C#, is still a win. C# has improved a ton since F# appeared, but it's still clunky. Microsoft should have had a push, F# for everyone, but this is the company that had to be dragged into generics (by the F# people) so I don't know what we'd expect.
All F# needs is real committment to level tooling. Instead it's an afterthought. It's enough to give even me pause when starting a project.
I'm tempted to do my own little part, putting my money where my mouth is, by advertising, perhaps on LinkedIn, that F# is exactly what is necessary to lure me away from my current gig and on to your opportunity.
And I can go pretty far - I have one working spouse, no major commitments, and have lived in one spot long enough I would prefer that my next role be elsewhere.
Admittedly, any other comparable (or even better?) language could lure me just as readily.
You can gripe about your fav UI stack not being supported just the way you want (you don't seem to have any other complaints), but your claim the language is not improving is wrong.
