Opening an .fsx file - also from C# projects or outside a project - should trigger an install of the Visual F# Tools

FAKE is an important build tool in the .NET ecosystem. Our company and many of our customers are using it to automate the build and deployment process. We always used VisualStudio to edit FAKE scripts and until VS2015 this worked with every Visual Studio installation out of the box.

Now in Visual Studio 2015 Visual F# is no longer part of a default installation (see https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/issues/544). In general it’s a good idea to make VS install features on demand, but unfortunately it breaks our workflow here. While opening a F# project (*.fsproj files) triggers the installer, opeing *.fsx files does not. So if you have a VB or C#-only solution the installer will not be triggered - even if you have a FAKE build script (which is usally called build.fsx).

The solution for us would be to trigger the F# installer when VS 2015 detects a *.fsx in the solution. EDIT: I think triggering the installer when a *.fsx is opened would be enough.

Unfortunately I don’t know of any other situation in VS where a similar situation is happening, but I assume if VS would unbundle C# and VB compilers then we would know very soon.

[forki]

It’s a bit sad to hear that this is a “feature request” instead of a bug. Anyways cool to hear that this will get addressed eventually 😉

@KevinRansom yes we all agree that a “lazy install VS” is the way to go. But introducing this completely untested (at least untested from community) and after the RC phase feels a bit like kick in the monads for people who evangelize F# every day. But we already discussed this. So thanks for logging this in the VS Installer bug tracker.

[dsyme]

Duplicate of https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/issues/1040