What you need for this book 

We need to ensure that we have met all of the software and hardware requirements and that we have their correct versions as well.

Basic requirements and setup environments

The following are the requirement specifications for an F# environment:

• Visual Studio 2015 Update 3. The minimum edition is Community Edition because it is the free minimum version of Visual Studio, which has extensibility support and Visual F# (also F# project templates) as part of the installation. Express Edition is not recommended because it has no F# project templates built in.
• .NET 4.6 as the minimum target runtime.
• Windows 7 SP1 (Windows 8.1 Update 1 64-bit or Windows 10 64-bit is recommended)

The following are the Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 hardware requirements:

• 4 GB RAM on Windows 7 SP1 or 6 GB RAM on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.
• At least a Core 2 Duo or Athlon processor. It is recommended to have Core i5 as it is also a recommendation for a Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 machine. Also, using Core i5 will provide easier illustrations to see multi core in action when we discuss concurrency in Chapter 4 and 5.
• Approximately 12 GB to 15 GB of disk space with Windows 10 UWP installed (without Android development feature).
• DirectX 9.0c capable display adapter.

For more information, please check the requirement specification on MSDN:

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/visual-studio-2015-system-requirements-vs.aspx

Note

We recommend having at least 8 GB of RAM. This minimal memory size is recommended in order to have an optimal experience for not just running F# code. For large F# projects, Visual Studio IDE will load type information, metadata and debug symbols in the background, and Visual Studio's memory consumption will quickly climb to more than 3 GB. This is why 64-bit Windows is recommended as it allows us to use RAM higher than 4 GB.