I second this. Instead of whining we (or some subset of "we") should just write a new, shiny metal, free, open-source tool. We might call it ".NetScope", "BlackGateReflektor" or something like this. I'm sure someone can also come up with a cooler name.

First, thanks for your feedback. I realize I've been a bit too vague in my initial post; however your suggestions reflect what I initially suspected. Let me clarify a bit. I'm currently working on a 3D game and I've created a texture loader using the producer / consumer queue pattern. Depending on the view distance and the player position, I load and unload landscape textures from hard disk. I assumed (wrongly) that loading textures from another thread would be non-blocking for the main thread; this was not the case, since upon testing I was experiencing hiccups. In another forum I read that perhaps an asynchronous loading would generally perform better (i.e. no hiccups). Seeing as I'm bound to load many textures per loader usage, I was curious to know about the performance of FileStream objects. I know they have to be correctly disposed; I'm not sure how the loader would behave when there are many concurrent asynchronous locks - if there's such a thing. I know some testing would pretty much answer, but I thought that having some feedback, some first-hand experience on the matter would save me some time (which is never enough!). Thanks again for any further advice, Rob PS: For any of you interested, some game screenshots can be found in the Gallery section of www.darkmana.com[^]

Try Google[^]. There are some pages that might be helpful. Luis Alonso Ramos Intelectix Chihuahua, Mexico My Blog!

Paul Conrad wrote: I have always thought the OS takes care of any internationalization. But it does. The scanToAscii method returns modifier-aware input. If you press shift and then a, you get "A". It's indeed very handy. My main problem is that it behaves oddily. So, to reiterate, I was wondering how this can be done in a managed way - I don't care if it eventually boils down to those user32 calls. I think WPF has an Input.Keyboard class somewhere, I was looking for something similar for previous .net versions. Still, thanks for your reply. I will check the google groups for info as well. Regards.

Thank you, Colin.

Hi Roberto, I dont know MSIL in detail, but some stack oriented machines have a "duplicate" or "dup" instruction that just duplicates "top of stack" (I know PostScript has it). If there is, it may be cheaper than a second load. BTW I forgot the most obvious tip of all: if the method you call is short, you should inline it (and if its long, then thats where you should optimize). Regards, Luc Pattyn

I managed to make it work with a object[] argument. Thanks for your support so far, it's been very precious. Regards, Roberto