Fsharp: Generate References for FSI

[fierval]

VS 2017, Nightly builds of F# Tools, missing "Generate References for F# interactive".
Is the feature going to be ported?

[cloudRoutine]

eventually

[halcwb]

What is the status of this feature request? This is much needed. I am going to revert to a previous VS if this isn't fixed soon ;-(

[Overlord-Zurg]

My company blocks Paket, so it would be nice to have this feature available in VS2017.

[cartermp]

We're past the point where this can come in VS 2017. VS 2019 could have this, and we'd certainly welcome a PR that implements it.

[NickDarvey]

I only started using F# after this feature was already removed, but could I just check my understanding of what it was?

You could right-click on a project in your solution, 'generate references', and start opening modules defined in said project in the F# Interactive window?

If so, this sounds brilliant. I haven't actually used the F# interactive window because I always want to reference types I've defined in my project. Is the only workaround to this manually #r referencing built project assemblies?

[fierval]

You have answered both your questions exactly right.

[cartermp]

@NickDarvey this used to be a part of a third-party extension. Now that #r "nuget:...' is in and there is a general mechanism to do that, we'll likely move forward with #8764 and once that's in place, wire it up in tooling.

[abelbraaksma]

This is the project that used to enable this feature. Perhaps someone can fix / recompile it for VS2019 while the feature materializes for vNext (which I believe is still a year or so away).

https://github.com/fsprojects/Archive-VisualFSharpPowerTools/blob/master/README.md

[halcwb]

I only started using F# after this feature was already removed, but could I just check my understanding of what it was?

You could right-click on a project in your solution, 'generate references', and start opening modules defined in said project in the F# Interactive window?

If so, this sounds brilliant. I haven't actually used the F# interactive window because I always want to reference types I've defined in my project. Is the only workaround to this manually #r referencing built project assemblies?

@NickDarvey. As to you're second question, luckily there is a replacement. But then you have to use paket as you're package manager. You can then generate load scripts by:

paket generate-load-scripts

This will generate load script files in the .paket/load/.. folders. You can then do like:

#load ".paket/load/netstandard2.0/main.group.fsx"