The good folks at MSDN have started F# forums. Don Syme announces the new forums here. The Visual F# General forum can be found here. There is also a great F# starter page here.

This announcement, in my mind, closes the F# circle of legitimacy. The MSDN F# forums are a commitment from Microsoft to meet the community and engage the growth of the language in ways that only a large organization can.

In July, 2005, a friend mentioned F# and asked if I had seen it, knowing I did research and analytics. I hadn't and thought it was Fortran for .NET, seeing the "F". He mentioned Don Syme's End Bracket Article in the July 2005 edition of MSDN magazine. That was my introduction. Learning F# took some time and there weren't many F# people around. Robert Pickering was one of the few that influenced me, especially with his blog and articles on F#. I had a few email conversations with Don Syme and read the F# email list.

After talking with Don, I started hubFS so that people had a place to meet and discuss F#. In the early hubFS days, circa early 2006, the site was really one of the few places to do so and the community at large really used the site to have great discussions. While I have yet to meet Dr. Syme in person, accessibility to him remains a cornerstone to the success of this language.

In those days, I had hoped that one day that F# would be a fully supported language in the Developer Division at Microsoft. It has met this hope.

hubFS is a little older and a little less modern, but the community spirit here is still alive and well. As long as there is a great sense of community here, I'll be around with this site.

I encourage you to continue to grow your ideas here, ask questions and help others. I also encourage you to use the other useful F# sites, including the new MSDN F# forums, Stack Overflow and others.