[ODE] .NET bindings

[Terry L. Triplett]

Hi Jason,

Now that the surprise has worn off, it occurred to me that other than the
revelation that .NET bindings were in the works, being (for now) essentially
a one-man show, folks know little or nothing about them.  It would be
helpful to have a bit more information to place these bindings into context.

Questions that come to mind:

What are the overarching design goals?  The goal of eliminating/minimizing
use of unsafe code has been mentioned, but that's a narrowly focused
technical goal.  What about the API as it appears to a user?  Would the
bindings mimic the low level ODE API as Tao does, or would the plan be to
create something more in keeping with .NET ideoms?  Does it make sense to
keep thinking about things like OdeDotNet or OPAL.NET that wrap the low
level API with a higher level OO interface?

Will the bindings be kept current with ongoing ODE development at each
release?  I think that's the assumption everyone makes when considering the
concept of "official .NET bindings".  That's a big assumption to make,
though.

A committment to maintain cross-platform compatability (basically
translatable these days to "runs under Mono") seems to be a goal, so I'll
assume that will continue to be the case.

What version(s) of the .NET framework would be supported?  .NET 2.0 and
above, I'm guessing, but again, that's just an assumption.

Cheers, and thanks for starting this line of development.

On 9/19/06, Jason Perkins <starkos at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've just merged the in-progress .NET bindings into the trunk. As I
> said, these are still in progress, there are a lot of functions
> missing but I can start a drawstuff scene, drop boxes and capsules,
> and see them bounce around. I am going to finish implementing the
> BoxStack demo, and then I'll go back and fill in the remaining blanks.
> Find it in ode/contribs/Ode.NET. I had to make some changes to the
> (premake) build system to get drawstuff to build as a DLL, and I added
> dBodyCopyPosition(), dBodyCopyRotation(), etc. to play nice with the
> .NET P/Invoke API.
>
> On a related note, I noticed that we still have contribs for dRay,
> dCylinder, and GeomTransformGroup. Should we remove those?
>
> Jason
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