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F# can be installed and used without visual studio.

My questions concern the other side of the coin. Is it possible to upgrade F# keeping the same version of Visual Studio? How to do that?

The language is fast moving. The F# ecosystem has already moved forward from version 3.0 to 3.1.1 yet Visual FSharp Tools 3.1.1 only supports Visual Studio 2013. On the other hand, we do not plan to upgrade our VS 2012 licenses anytime soon.

In theory Visual Studio should be independent from the version of FSharp tools running under the hood. However, how do IntelliSense and the Fsi fit in the picture?

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NoIdeaHowToFixThis
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    This seems like a restatement of your last one https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23383343/how-to-update-fsharp-core-for-visual-studio-2012-fsi. What is the difference? – John Palmer May 01 '14 at 10:03
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    Well, as the title indicates, my last one concerns fixing a specific bug prob. due to the fsi incorrectly referencing a wrong version of FSharp.Core. After some thought, I decided to open a new question with a more general scope. I'd like to understand how Visual Studio and IntelliSense will support the progress of the whole ecosystem (compiler, fsi, core framework libraries, etc). I am not sure how all the pieces fit together, what is independent from what. – NoIdeaHowToFixThis May 01 '14 at 10:37
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    This is something I have already done, and I will ask permission to post their answer in this same thread. I deemed interesting asking this very same question here because understanding how the different pieces of the ecosystem (framework libraries, such as FSharp.Core, compiler, fsi, ..) fit together and integrate with VS has been something rather challenging. Therefore, I thought that this would prove valuable information, for myself and for other users on SO – NoIdeaHowToFixThis May 01 '14 at 10:52
  • @JohnPalmer, why not ask it here? Many SO questions could be answered by dev teams, but that is not normally a reason to not ask them here. Why this question specifically? It seems to me that: a. this is something the F#/VS experts would know, and b. other users would be interested in. – Stephen Hosking May 02 '14 at 06:53
  • I think that @JohnPalmer point is that part of my question may also touch the topic of the licensing policy that is decided by the VS team on commercial grounds, rather than being a traditional techie question. – NoIdeaHowToFixThis May 02 '14 at 07:00
  • There are *many* questions on Visual Studio licensing in SO. It's an important developer topic. See, for example, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12408610/limitations-of-visual-studio-2012-express-desktop, with more than 100 upvotes on the question and answer (combined). – Stephen Hosking May 03 '14 at 08:16
  • @Javaman59 - I agree. – NoIdeaHowToFixThis May 03 '14 at 12:16
  • The last three comments relate to a second comment by JohnPalmer which has now been deleted. They do not relate to his first comment above. – Stephen Hosking May 08 '14 at 23:42

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As a first draft, I would like to start pointing out that Microsoft confirmed that VS and the F# language tooling are not entirely decoupled. The policy, as far as I could assess, will be that F# tools updates may require and support only the latest version of Visual Studio as it is the case of Visual F# tools 3.1.1.

NoIdeaHowToFixThis
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