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copied!<p>F# actually has some very nice constructs for creating event-driven UI applications, such as <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/articles/FSharpCompositionalEvents.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">First Class Events</a>, <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233237(VS.100).aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Object Expressions</a>, calling property setters from a constructor e.g.: </p> <p><code>new Form(Text="My Window Title", Width=600, Height=400)</code>,</p> <p>and much else.</p> <p>However, creating a <em>forms designer</em> in VS reqiures a CodeDom for your language. The current CodeDom architecture works great, as long as your language looks <em>exactly</em> like C# or VB; it does not lend itself well to generation of F# code (this from a webcast or interview that I can't locate right now). It also requires partial classes, which if I recall correctly, are not supported in the language as of Beta 1. Rather than focus on designer support in the first release, the F# team decided to spend their resources on enhancing other parts of the language, such as asynchronous and parallel programming, etc.</p> <p>What this means is that you have at least 4 choices for creating UI in F#:</p> <ul> <li>Write all UI code by hand, which is fine for simple apps;</li> <li>Create your F# code as a library to handle the "hard parts," like asynchronous and parallel code, or computation centric code, and call it from C#/VB;</li> <li>Create your UI code as a C#/VB library, and both drive it from F# and delegate event handling to F#; or</li> <li>Use a <a href="http://www.devx.com/enterprise/Article/40481" rel="nofollow noreferrer">DSL</a> or <a href="http://www.devx.com/enterprise/Article/40481/0/page/2" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Computation Expression (monad)</a> to simplify building the UI by hand (just discovered this while looking for other links in this answer).</li> </ul> <p>Of these, calling a C# UI library from F# may be the most flexible while still retaining a familiar paradigm. But, using computation expressions for quickly building UI by hand is certainly worth looking at.</p>

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