I started thinking about working on "Ajax" framework quite a long time ago - the key thing I really wanted from the beginning was using the same language for writing both client and server side code and the integration between these two sides, so you could write an event handler and specify if it should be executed on the client or on the server side. About a year ago I visited Cambridge (thanks to the MVP program) and I had a chance to talk with Don Syme [^]. Don showed me a few things in F# and suggested using F# for this project, so when I was later selected to do an internship at MSR, this was one of the projects that I wanted to work on.
The original reason for using F# was its support for meta-programming ([8], which makes it extremely easy to translate part of the page code-behind code to JavaScript. During my internship, the F# team was also working on a feature called computational expressions, which proved to be extremely useful for the F# Web Tools as well - I bet you'll hear a lot about this from Don soon, so I'll describe only the aspects that are important for this project. Aside from these two key features that F# has, I also quite enjoyed programming in F# itself - I already used it for a few things during the last year, but I could finally work on a large project in F# (and discuss the solution with the real experts!) and I don't believe I would be able to finish the project of similar complexity during less than three months in any other language (but this is a different topic, which deserves separate blog post).
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