I am going to write a GUI for a chess game that will require a few things:

* Graphics (obviously), nothing real time, just update the
  board when a piece is moved
* Networking support for play over the net
* Text pipe interprocess communication (required for support
  of chess engine->GUI communication protocol)
* Preferably portable

I looked into wxWindows, and it offers portable support for all of the things I mentioned (graphics, networking, text pipe IPC), but I have been wanting to give C# a try. I''m leaning towards C++ and wxWindows basically because I don''t know C# yet. I need advice here. Should I try learning C# and doing all of the other stuff, or just use the language I already know? Plus C# isn''t portable (yet) as far as I know.

Doesn''t sound like you need much of a GUI. If you want to stay portable, use wxWindows or even GLUT if you just need a simple window in which to render OpenGL. Check out ACE for your networking and IPC. It''s portable as well.

If portability isn''t that important and your target platform is Windows, use C# and .NET.

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Dave Mikesell Software & Consulting