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Line of business applications: Will F# make my life easy?

Asked 2010-02-23T16:26:52.860
31

I develop mainly line of business applications.No scientific operations. No complex calculations. Just tie User Interface to database. The only reason I use threading is to do some work in background and still keep UI responding.

This may not be the best approach but this is what I follow

1.Create an working application first(without threads) and give it to end user to play for the sake of feedback.
2.Once all requirements are locked, I try to use threads wherever it makes sense to improve performance.

The code for steps 1 & 2 is overwhelmingly different and threading code dominates the actual code.

1.Will F# make my life easier in case of Line of Business applications?
2.Are there any particular UI technologies that will fit best with F#? I mainly work on ASP.NET & Silverlight. WPF now & then.
3.Are there any good examples of Line of business applications/demos with F#?

I am not asking whether it is possible to develop Line of Business application in F#. I am asking whether F# will make my life easier to develop Line of Business applications when compared to C#? My main concern will be threading & UI synchronization.

c# .net asp.net silverlight f#
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That's a very hard question to answer - I think that F# would make some aspects of your life much easier and some a bit harder.

On the plus side, dealing with threading should be relatively painless - F# async workflows are a huge benefit. Also, F# Interactive makes rapidly iterating and exploring code very easy. To me, this is a huge benefit over C#, since I can test out minor code changes without going through a full build.

On the down side, the tooling for F# isn't where it is for C#, which means that you won't have access to GUI-builders, refactoring tools, etc. It's hard to say how big of a productivity hit this would cause you without knowing more about your scenario. One workaround would be to create a multi-language solution which has a thin C# front-end, but again the complexity may not be worth the benefit.

answered 2010-02-23T16:53:47.333

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