Well, it's been a while since I've posted. First, some changes:

• znOptions has been renamed to znConfig.
• The library has been redesigned to support more than one options style platform.
• Instead of hard-coding the save formats, I will use a plug-in architecture (more on this later).

Second, I have found some additional resources that have provided additional inspiration and ideas:

• Nini - As per the description, "Nini is an uncommonly powerful .NET configuration library designed to help build highly configurable applications quickly." Though I haven't used this library, reading the documentation seems to hold this up.
• libconfig - The description states, "Libconfig is a simple library for manipulating structured configuration files, like this one: test.cfg. This file format is more compact and more readable than XML. And unlike XML, it is type-aware, so it is not necessary to do string parsing in application code." The type-aware part is interesting, though I've no intention of looking at the source code so I will be coming up with a solution for that independently.
• Elektra - Specifically, the backend page gave me some ideas about databases.

I was half-done with znConfig when I came across Nini. Looking at the documentation, I realized that it was what I wanted to implement when I came up with the idea in the first place. As such, I also remembered another library that I was supposed to implement first: znPlugin, a generic plug-in library.

As such, development on znConfig has temporarily ceased until znPlugin is done. Please see the next post for more information about znPlugin.

NOTE: In case there is any question, I am not reading/downloading/studying/... any source code from any of the libraries mentioned in my posts (save for the MSDN reference code). The whole point here is to learn about F# through implementation ("learn by doing", and all that).