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Visual Haskell is a plugin for Microsoft's Visual Studio development environment to support development of Haskell software. Like the other Visual languages, Visual Haskell integrates with the Visual Studio editor to provide interactive features to aid Haskell development, and it enables the construction of projects consisting of multiple Haskell modules.
In order to use Visual Haskell, you need Visual Studio .NET 2003. Right now, this is the only supported version of Visual Studio - unfortunately we haven't yet added support for the 2005 Beta. The Express languages (Visual C++ Express etc.) also will not work, because they don't have support for plugins.
You don't need to install GHC separately: Visual Haskell is bundled with a complete GHC distribution, and various other tools (Happy, Alex, Haddock).
The latest Visual Haskell installer can be obtained from here:
This is the first release that is:
It works fine for us, but it is still in a earlier development stage so if you encounter any problems with it, please send us a report.
The other highlights are:
many space-leak fixes.
Visual Studio can safely unload the plugin when it isn't required anymore.
both the normal and the profiling versions of all libraries are packaged. (version 0.0 was distributed with just the normal libraries).
Visual Studio APIs license was relaxed and now the source code of the plugin is open. Visual Haskell is available in both source and binary form under BSD like license.
This release is a technology preview, and should be considered alpha quality. It works for us, but you are fairly likely to encounter problems. If you're willing to try it out and report bugs, we'd be grateful for the feedback.
This release of Visual Haskell is bundled with a development snapshot of GHC, version 6.5 from around 14 September 2005. This version of GHC is used to provide the interactive editing features, and will be used to compile all code inside Visual Haskell. It is possible that in future releases we may be able to relax this tight coupling between Visual Haskell and the bundled GHC.
Please note that future releases of Visual
Haskell will update the compiler, and hence the
packages, and so may break your code. Also note that because
the bundled GHC is not a released version, it may have bugs and
quirks itself: please report them as usual to
<glasgow-haskell-bugs@haskell.org>.
We're not making source code for the plugin generally available at this time, due to licensing restrictions on the Visual Studio APIs that the plugin uses (for more information see Visual Studio Extensibility Center). If you're interested in contributing to Visual Haskell, please get in touch with the authors.
Please report bugs to
<glasgow-haskell-bugs@haskell.org> (subscribe here), clearly indicating
that your bug report relates to Visual Haskell, and giving as much
information as possible so that we can reproduce the bug. Even if
you can't reproduce the bug reliably, it is still useful to report
what you've seen.
For help and support, use the
<glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org> (subscribe here) mailing list.
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Copyright © The University of Glasgow. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Krasimir Angelov. All rights reserved.
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