Why did Antheus Technology choose the Microsoft® .NET Framework development environment for the Agora SDK?   The answer is to benefit the developer and the systems integrator.  The .NET Framework offers a number of advantages to developers, such as:

Consistent Programming Model

Different programming languages have different approaches for doing a task. For example, accessing data with a VB 6.0 application and a VC++ application is totally different. When using different programming languages to do a task, a disparity exists among the approach developers use to perform the task. The difference in techniques comes from how different languages interact with the underlying system that applications rely on.
 
With .NET, for example, accessing data with a VB .NET and a C# .NET looks very similar apart from slight syntactical differences. Both programs need to import the System.Data namespace, both programs establish a connection with the database and both programs run a query and display the data on a data grid. With .NET there's a unified way of accomplishing the same task by using the .NET Class Library, a key component of the .NET Framework.  The functionality that the .NET Class Library provides is available to all .NET languages resulting in a consistent object model regardless of the programming language the developer uses.

Direct Support for Security

Developing an application that resides on a local machine and uses local resources is easy. In this scenario, security isn't an issue as all the resources are available and accessed locally.  Consider an application that accesses data on a remote machine or has to perform a privileged task on behalf of a non-privileged user.  In this scenario security is much more important as the application is accessing data from a remote machine.
 
With .NET the Framework enables the developer and the system administrator to specify method level security. It uses industry-standard protocols such as TCP/IP, XML, SOAP and HTTP to facilitate distributed application communications. This makes distributed computing more secure because .NET developers cooperate with network security devices instead of working around their security limitations.