title: What to use? Tao, SharpGL, OpenTK, DirectX P/Invoke, XNA, MDX, SlimDX, Windows API Codec Pack
body: <p>Back in the day it was easy; You made your own 3D stuff, then came DirectX, then came OpenGL. For .Net developers MDX was nice. Then XNA took over for MDX, but it its not the same. XNA seems to be very game-centric with all the content pipelining and preloading of fixed models and stuff.</p>
  
  <p>So where do we stand now? After a couple of days of reasearch/trial&amp;error I feel everywhere I look I find half developed libraries, libraries with overhead, severe limitations or libraries that are overly complex.</p>
  
  <p>I want to do "free-hand" 3D stuff. For instance displaying 200k dots on a screen in 3D and move them around at 30fps (Kinect depth image). I want to make 3D screensavers, audio analysis plugins, etc. All of which is not prefabs for a content pipeline, and which require high performance. And (ehm) I want to do it from .Net.</p>
  
  <p>Anyone have experience with libraries that are easy/understandable and still gives some fair amount of freedom and speed?</p>