A new Visual Studio template has been added to the latest Visual Studio installer called "Self-Hosted Client-Server Application," and you can use this template to build OWIN-based self-hosted applications that can be deployed via an .exe file and without requiring an installed web container (IIS, etc.) on the serving machine.

As we all gear up for an exciting summer, I wanted to share some insights into the upcoming CloudSharper enhancements we are rolling out in the next few months.

Are you an F# user on Mac OS or Linux, looking for the easiest way to develop multi-project F# solutions with full code assistance and type checking? Would you like to use F# Interactive for developing and testing parts of your web applications interactively? Would you like to benefit from the multitude of web libraries in your development environment? Well, if yes - look no further, CloudSharper, the world's most versatile online IDE has arrived to Mac and Linux!

This release continues our efforts to require fewer dependencies on your machine before you can use CloudSharper. In earlier releases, various CloudSharper templates (most notably, the WebSharper Sitelet Website template) required .targets files that were part of Visual Studio. This dependency is now eliminated.

We are happy to announce CloudSharper Local alpha 0.9.8, encapsulating the latest enhancements to the F# compiler service and delivering several bug fixes to CloudSharper's msbuild support.