The family of .NET languages is increasing

F# will be the youngest language in the .NET family. Just a few days before the release of the VS 2008, Microsoft development tool Vice-President Soma Somasegar announced that his division would work with Microsoft Research to integrate the F# language into Visual Studio. F# is a project that looks to exploit functional programming techniques.

It has been suggested that the syntax of F# would be an difficult to typical programmers trying to learn functional concepts. Former Microsoft hand James Plamondon commented that moves like this portent the day when ''programmers would chose the best language to write each piece of a coding task, just as a carpenter uses a hammer for one task and a saw for another.''