VS Community or VSCode with Ionide?

Hey,

what is your suggestion for a beginner, who wants to start withs something like a calculator etc.? And why?

Greetings

I just saw that there is no GUI programming for F# in Visual Studio (WPF and Windows Forms).
Why is this?
I though it would be a nice helpline for me as a newcomer. That was the only main reason for me to install VS Community over VS Code tbh…

It depends on your experience and personal preference. You can try both and see which fits better.

Do you mean templates? Well, I agree it’s a bit annoying.

JetBrains Rider. F# support in VS is buggy as hell and getting worse and worse. Ionide is a toy project, it’s ok if you write simple projects or scripts tho.

I think you’re doing a disservice to Ionide, it often has F# features before every other editor/IDE and has been incredibly useful. Considering it is free it’s incredible, definitely worth considering.

I tried i yesterday evening and so far i like it a lot!
Ionide is well though out!

Since there are no WPF templates for F# in VS, I would try one of these:

  1. http://fsprojects.github.io/FSharp.Desktop.UI/
    I have not tried this one, but it looks well thought out, and there’s a whole blog series documenting it.

  2. https://fsprojects.github.io/FsXaml/
    I have use this one, but only for the simplest of apps. It definitely works though, when targeting the full .NET Framework, at least.

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I used (and continue to use) VS Code with Ionide to learn F#. A nice, strong but simple editor that I also use for C#, Rust, Go and JS. Nice having one tool that fits all, unlike what I use for work (VS Professional). That being said, for big projects, which I would largely define as those which have more than one project, a bigger IDE like VS is probably best (which is why I use it at work, instead of VS Code).

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Could you describe, why exactly?
Performance of VS Code itself is slower when a lot of code is written and run?

Nope, its just IDEs like VS do a lot of code analysis and cross-project reference stuff that VS Code doesnt do. Large scale refactoring, highly competent intellisense etc, sorts of stuff that gets really useful when code is in different assemblies, or across hundreds of files etc. Not really what VS Code is for, in my view, and part of what makes VS Code so zippy is precisely that it doesnt try to do those things.

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