F# is a functional first general purpose programming language targeting the .NET Framework. Since .NET is a framework commonly used for web development (most often with C# and ASP.NET). And if we would like to do web development on the .NET framework in a more functional style, using F# is the logical choice.
F# is a language loved by its community, which is actively working on improving its tooling and creating its own ecosystem. This also means that sometimes the experience of the development workflow is less streamlined than its C# counterpart, which is usually officially supported by Microsoft and integrated into Visual Studio. If we want to get started with web development in F#, we might need to use some workarounds to get our existing tools working, or we’ll need to roll our own scripts implementing our workflow.
In this series I’d like to give an overview of the different ways we can use F# for web development today, and describe the steps we have to take to get started. There are several blog posts and tutorials out there about this topic, but all of them only cover the necessary configuration for a particular combination of frameworks. (And many of them are also pretty outdated.) With this series I want to collect all the up to date information needed for getting started in some of the common scenarios, and I’ll include the links to the sources I used.
I plan to cover the following scenarios. (I’ll update the links in this list as I publish the posts. The list might also change as I go along and encounter new ways to use F#.)