JetBrains continues to evolve Rider, their cross-platform IDE for .NET. Rider is intended to become a serious alternative to the role filled by the Visual Studio family. In April's release of the Rider preview (EAP 21), the new features are highlighted by support for the F# functional programming langauge.
Since this is the first public release of Rider with F#, it should be known that this support is nowhere close to being feature complete. With EAP21, Rider can build and debug F# projects with the usual support for code completion, source code navigation, and syntax highlighting. What isn’t included today is debugging support for .NET Core based-F#, F#’s scripting files (.fsx), or an immediate window. JetBrains has promised this functionality will be coming in a future release and will be providing more details soon. Given the company's past history of incorporating user feedback, it is a good time for F# developers to try out this EAP and report their suggestions to JetBrains for inclusion in a future release.
EAP21 includes Microsoft’s TFS plugin as part of its regular installation, meaning developers looking to interact with TFS and Visual Studio Team Services can get started quicker. Also new in this release is support for XML doc comments. Some of the more notable fixes made in this release include the ability to reference portable projects (first reported for EAP19), correction of a regression bug that prevented the loading of Mono-based projects, and the inability to edit HTML text in .cshmtl files.
Those interested in trying out the latest preview can do so by visiting JetBrains, while the full list of bugs fixed in EAP 21 is available for those seeking detailed information.