Is F# a usable language for .net windows development

Question

I have been hearing about F# and Microsoft now have a guy who is blogging and coding away in redmond somewhere about it. Can you really write GUI code from F# (I'd love to see an example of say adding a button to a form and subscribing to the onclick event for instance)

Does F# have full access to all of .Net?

I'm honestly curious and I know I could google but I'd love to hear from someone who is really using the language.

Answer 1

Yes, you can certainly write WinForms apps - although you wouldn't override the OnClick method, you'd subscribe to the Click event.

Yes, F# has full access to .NET, although you won't get very idiomatic functional code if you use a lot of mutable types.

Tomáš Petříček's F# web site has sample source code from his book (disclaimer: I'm involved with the book too, so I'm clearly biased) which has WinForms examples.

Answer 2

I'd highly recommend this excellent post by Scott Hanselman, which points to some F# resources including examples and presentations.