Coffee?

From my understanding of music composer setups, a Mac DAW ( Digital Audio Workstation ) is as common as a Windows based one. This suggests that the end user targeted by this project could be on either platform and developing for one will completely cut out the other. In an area of development where helping the user is the primary focus, isolating one group because of platform choice might not be in the best interests of the application. Perhaps C# is not the ideal language to develop this software with as using windows forms will restrict users to a windows environment.

A different, more cross platform approach would be to use the JVM environment. Java has a very powerful GUI development API called Swing, rivaling Microsoft's Windows Forms and after following some of this tutorial on using the JNI ( Java Native Interface ) I have learned that it is fairly simple to call C++ code in Java similar to the way I can in C#. So far Java would act in a similar fashion to C# in this project while hopefully providing a platform independent solution. The only conflicts that would arise regarding platform dependence would come from the unmanaged C++ code. These would be possible to resolve as the audio API of choice, FMOD, is cross platform. From what I can tell from the Firelight website is that they're are different libraries depending on run time environment so this may be an issue if the underlying C++ structure will need to be tailored for the specific platform.

While Java does not have any support for pointer arithmetic ( a large advantage of C# ) the JNI does allow java objects to be manipulated in unmanaged code. This does pose as a huge advantage over C# because even though you can marshall C++ data types to C# data types you cannot do it the other way round. Obviously without a complete design layout of the application I cannot determine which techniques are more appropriate to this situation. However, at face value Java does seem to be very inviting.

Some tests and tutorials will need to be completed before a final decision can be made. I do have experience with C# but having never touched Java before it would be foolish to jump straight in and depend on it.