I am trying to switch from xml to F# to configure my company's product which is written heavily in C#. My co-workers love Microsoft products/languages and so finally being able to sneak in a strong typed functional language is wonderful, but I must do it seamlessly for it to be successful. FSC and Visual Studio are making it quite difficult and I need any advice you guys have to offer.

First problem is using FSC for a project which will have a few hundred files. I cannot seem to find anything similar to makefiles or other tools to assist in compilation. Simply keeping a list of files in their order is not maintainable and will quickly take this project outside my reach as the solution needs to be simple enough that non-programmers can add files to the project. My solution so far has been a program which opens the files in all sub folders and searches for `open' and `module' and then creates the list used by FSC. This seems like a sub optimal solution.

Second problem is Visual Studio 2005. The F# project type is very limited (I assume to make the syntax checker and compiler easier to integrate). I need to still use the Visual Studio program as the people who will edit these confs after me will not tolerate another program just for confs, but it is not suited for this size F# program. My short term solution is to create C# project and just populate it with the F# files, however this causes the syntax checker to break as files are not in their final compilation order.

I feel that these two issues must have been tackled by others so any more graceful solutions would be much appreciated.