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Comment by jarcane | Hacker News Reader

What I mean is writing a desktop application without falling back to using C# for all the front-end code and relegating F# to being a glorified DSL for data processing.

Microsoft doesn't believe anyone wants to make apps in F#; Visual Studio doesn't even come with templates for it. You're expected to use F# to write libraries like Fsharp.Data, and write your app code in C#.

If I wanted to code in C#, I'd code in C#, but I don't.

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    open System.Windows.Forms
 
    [<EntryPoint>]
    let main argv = 
        let form = new Form()
        let button = new Button()
        button.Text <- "Click me"
        button.Click.Add (fun _ -> MessageBox.Show "Hello" |> ignore)
        form.Controls.Add button
        Application.Run form
        0

jarcane didn't say you can't he said the documentation is all but non-existant

I have written thousands of pages of example applications in articles for the F# Journal.

There are some decent samples on MSDN, 56 in F# at the time of writing. Most aren't GUI apps, but some are.

https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/site/search?f%5B0%5D.Type=Pr...

My "WPF Image Cropper" sample might be interesting to you - pure F# WPF via XAML type provider. I am not a GUI dev, though, so it's probably crap design :)

A desktop app on Windows either uses WPF or WinForms. In either case F# doesn't stop at all. In fact I would say that building WPF desktop on F# is more intuitive than C#.

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