Gap

Sorry for a bit of a gap in the posting. Blame Microsoft; VS2010 is full of new stuff and it's been a lot of fun playing around with it for the last couple of weeks!

One thing I've done is to begin my first large-scale project in F#; it's actually a proof-of-concept for some professional work I'm doing. It's going really well, and it has forced me to learn a lot of the nuts and bolts of putting together a large, maintainable project in F# as opposed to working mainly with isolated snippets and algorithms. Based on early analysis, I predict that it will benchmark faster than a C# version, and -- if I can get a handle on F# module and namespace practices -- it should be more maintainable. (The former due to the fact that the F# compiler provides very good optimization, and the latter due to the fact that the F# source is more succinct and more directly models the problem.)

I still have a few more hurdles to accomplish, including coming to grips with F#/Microsoft Office interaction, XML in F#, and WCF. But in the meantime, in an effort to keep this blog running, I'll cast about for some interesting things to post here.

Thanks again to the VS and F# team for making F# a reality in VS2010!

-Neil