At the moment .NET is making great inroads into all mobile platforms (mainly due to Xamarin's iOS and Android platforms).
The one area where Microsoft needs to push more i son the server side: to be able to develop ASP.NET apps and push them to Linux servers. You can do it now but not as smooth and stable as it should be.
When this happens, then the circle is complete: you can write both client and server code in C#/F# from within Visual Studio.
i think the potential for F# just got bigger and better with a brighter future!
this pretty much highlights the whole movement at Microsoft +Xamarin:
(and directly answers most of the questions in this thread)
Microsoft intends to make Xamarin's job a lot easier and realign its developer-oriented strategy in the same direction
Delivering on its promise to support cross-platform development, Microsoft is providing the full .NET server stack in open source, including ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, Framework and Libraries, enabling developers to build with .NET across Windows, Mac or Linux. Through this implementation, Microsoft will work closely with the open source community, taking contributions for future improvements to .NET and will work through the .NET Foundation.
“A strong, open source, cross-platform CLR opens significant new options for building large server-based systems,” said Brian McCallister, chief technology officer, Groupon. “This significantly expands the choices developers have when finding the right tool to solve their problem. I’m very excited to have access to the quality virtual machine and tooling of the CLR without having to completely rework our production infrastructure in order to run it!”
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this will be of great interest to those already using the CLR as it gives more incentive to those developers / dev shops
Quite a powerful combo at that point!