[PD] [Csnd] .NET Framework

[mark]

I'm forwarding this email 'cos its got useful info for windows 
external users in it...

cheers 

mark 

from Michael Gogins:

"I don't know if I have mentioned this before, but at this time the .NET
Framework Software Development Kit is available, free of cost, from
Microsoft at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/prodinfo/getdotnet.asp


Ths SDK does NOT contain Microsoft Visual Studio, so the poor programmer
must write a makefile, but it DOES contain everything you need to
develop, maintain, and deploy .NET applications.

For us music people, the really notable thing about this is that the
.NET Framework SDK contains the Microsoft Visual C++ version 7.0
compiler and all associated libraries, free of cost. This is a very good
compiler that produces significantly faster code, in significantly
shorter build times, than the earlier compiler - for which one had to
pay! It also produces significantly faster codethan gcc or g++, with
some shortfalls in adherence to the ANSI specification which are not
significant for my work.

In short, you can now get the Microsoft tools for free and they are
actually quite good. I am currently building CsoundVST and
silence::Orchestra with the .NET tools.

I have been getting experience with C# at my day job, and this language
may deserve serious attention for DSP programming. It appears, from
limited experience, to fall in between Java and optimized C++ in
execution speed, and it is as easy to write as Java. As some of you may
know, there is a MONO project from Ximian to produce an open source port
of C# and the .NET Framework classes for Linux. If this project
succeeds, C# could become a very viable alternative to Java or C++ for
open source programming.

For music programming, C# is not mature. It does not contain its own
classes for multimedia file access or performance management. However,
it does contain something of significant interest, namely very improved
network programming and remote procedure call programming, under the
rubric of "remoting". Essentially, remoting makes it SIGNIFICANTLY
easier to write distributed systems in a normal, function-call- and
callback- oriented programming style. It is MUCH easier, for example,
than Java RMI, CORBA, or DCE RPC, which do the same things.

It also is easy to write "native code" for C#, so PortAudio and PortMidi
could easily be given C# wrappers."