I’m beginning to explore the F# language – some years ago I spent quite a bit of time working with a language named “APL” which was a very influential early functional language, wonderful to use partly because it had it’s own symbolic notation like mathematics does, more of this in some future posts though…
Anyway I’ve recently discovered (thanks to Vasily Kirichenko – here’s his blog) that I can dynamically monitor the state of an F# Interactive session within Visual Studio 2013 (I havent tried earlier version of VS).
After some digging I also found out that I can configure Visual Studio so that the necessary script loading steps needed for this can be done automatically by setting some options within Visual Studio 2013.
First download a suitable build of the utility from here and unzip the file – you should eventually see a file named FsEye.FSX – this is the script.
Next go to Visual Studio and bring up the Tools –> Options dialog pane, in there navigate the tree view looking for the node “F# Tools” then select the child node “F# Interactive”.
Next situate the mouse cursor into the text edit area for the “F# Interactive options” row and add the load directive along with the full path for your downloaded .FSX file, this is what it should look like (the 64-bit setting is unimportant and unrelated to this post):
Next exit Visual Studio, restart it and either load an existing F# project or start a new one and activate the F# Interactive session, you should see these messages in the session’s window:
This shows that the script loaded successfully.
Next create some simple value and the FS Eye window should appear and reveal the details of the created value:
As new values are added to the session FsEye automatically detects them and adds them to it’s window, very useful stuff especially for someone like me who is new to F# and needs to see as much helpful stuff as possible.
That’s it, enjoy!