Hmm, that sounds great - until you have to work in a team, where other people have to read your code, then it's just egoistical. That's why we prefere C# over VB. Much more consistent to read (think stylecop, fxcop), among other reasons.

I have used NAudio for many things including real-time fft. It is very capable, but also the source code is amazingly nice, so it's easy to patch. Basically, it wraps the code for reading/writing samples and then you process the audio buffers (arrays) in an unsafe block, giving you superfast performance. Try it, it is a superb project and sounds like just what you need. I tried much other stuff before I found this, including wrapping DirectShow by myself.

Really, really far way. I now use SharpDevelop at my job, it's so mature, stable and more lightweight than VS. (plus I get to spend the VS licence money on other software) I tried MonoDevelop on my Mac, and it just lacks features (mostly refacturing, but I think also SVN. It doesn't come with an equivalent of StyleCop. Apart from the GTK interface, that's what really bugged me). It will get there, SharpDevelop was horrible in version 1, useable in 2 and really nice in version 3, but I think the major adoption hurdle is a GTK-GUI, but this is a general Mono/cross-platform C# conundrum.

Snow Leopard is worth it for the scrollable stacks, less space used and what apple call "easy text selection" imo. Smooth installation as always, but the most important point is a fair upgrade price. I loved Vista when it came out, and because of C# programming, I use Windows next to Mac (it's that good). But I don't like Windows 7. The UI changes like jumplist make it more cluttered, and I think that the slight color changes means there's less contrast in general. Also not loving the taskbar. I'm not noticing much more performance, less UAC annoyances (btw, rarely got UAC messages from Vista, only for updates and setting changes, similar to the password entry on a mac) and the price for an upgrade is too steep. My verdict: Snow Leopard is worth an update (if you can get it cheap), while I'll be sticking to Vista instead of upgrading to Windows 7.