After playing around with Java in the early days (JDK 1.2/1.3) and doing lots of JNI work, I left that area and worked mainly in C code and got lured into the C#/.NET world. Recently I evaluated lots of toolkits with the idea of playing around with 2D games and stuff like that. I found some C# DirectX projects, but nothing great. The interesting toolkits/libraries like : C# SDL.net Irrlicht.NET I found lots of others, but nothing that had either a small download for development (didn't want to download 400MB SDK), small deployment runtime, and was pure C#. Then I toyed with some native toolits, there are a lot more to choose from: Native HGE - excellent Windows 2D C++ toolkit SDL - cross platform C/C++ toolkit PureBasic - excellent, easy to get sprites blitting examples up and running, hard to judge performance because demo is always in debug mode but IDE is great and easy to use BlitzPlus - demo seemed ok, bad IDE, samples were not good. I saw an extra set of SDL bindings for ...