Should we add telemetry to improve our understanding of the usage of FSI within a Visual Studio session.

[KevinRansom]

Right now, we (or at least I) don't have a clear understanding of how Visual FSI is used by Visual Studio developers.

I.e.

1. Is it used on it's own, or used primarily with projects.
2. Are the scripts mostly saved to disk or mostly discarded.
3. Are saved scripts part of projects or free standing.
4. Which languages are the projects used with Fsi building.
5. Is the fsi session desktop or netsdk.
6. Do developers use interactive mode or execute process.
7. Is debug interactive session used a lot
8. How often is a session reset.
9. How often is a session cleared.
10. Are scripts long running or short.
11. Do the FSI settings get modified.

There are clearly many other interesting items that we could collect to allow us to design a better set of tooling.

Please propose others to the comments, so that we can figure out the benefits of improving .fsi.

[jimfoye]

I vote "no more telemetry". As it is my W10 disk light flashes day and night, literally 24 hours a day it is blinking, and I don't know why. A few weeks ago I tried to entice someone to join a beta program for a commercial product that I have developed, and he said he didn't want to install anything else on Windows because he was tired of programs talking over the Internet and he had no idea what they were talking about. I had to reassure him mine made one check on startup for updates, and that was it.

[vzarytovskii]

I vote "no more telemetry". As it is my W10 disk light flashes day and night, literally 24 hours a day it is blinking, and I don't know why. A few weeks ago I tried to entice someone to join a beta program for a commercial product that I have developed, and he said he didn't want to install anything else on Windows because he was tired of programs talking over the Internet and he had no idea what they were talking about. I had to reassure him mine made one check on startup for updates, and that was it.

Without telemetry we won't be able to really understand how our changes affected overall experience, be it perf, accessibility or usability.

It is really helpful for us and it will be much harder for us to justify and prioritise further improvements without really knowing if they're used or make any difference at all.

That said, F# telemetry in VS doesn't really add much, and is not a "passive" one in background. Only when typwchecking, intellisense, codefixes are initiated, etc.

Also, it's not a new thing.