Hmm. Yes avoiding data type conversions is a good thing. I think that you did some other good things as well. Not repeating "[font="Courier New"]Math.PI / 180.0[/font]" but using a precalculated constant is great. Plus you did that with some other non-changing elements as well. I'm then curious if your speed gains were due mostly to precalculation or data type conversion avoidance.

The CLR is based on the Dot Net framework and I have had quite a bit of experience with that. I have not gotten into the CLR yet as it is not available on the Compact Edition on the mobile side. Yet there are some things that us old procedural coders can pass along to help. I had an issue where I was looping though quite a set of items. For each one I had to call some functions that took a Long as a parameter. I saved a bit by using a Long as my loop counter and not having to convert for every function call. There was no way I was ever going to process that many items per run but using the right type saved the loop time overall.

It's good to point out this sort of thing as it's not obvious to new folk what is going on. The "less code is better code" is great but if your code calls stuff under the hood your small source can actually turn out tho be more code at run time. I suggest that you turn on both Option Explicit and Option Strict in your Visual Studio projects.

Good article.