WW: Progress Update:

After a slow start I got a few answers to my questions:

For WorldWind, the standard for development is Visual Studio 2005. Any changes I made to the project files (say adding a new class file) would need to be checked in by someone else using 2005 for backwards compatibility to all the other 2005 developers.

I was able to download Visual C# 2005 Express for free from Microsoft's site (link while it lasts: http://www.microsoft.com/express/2005/download/default.aspx ). I downloaded it as a CD image and created the installer on a CD I burned with the image.

I finally got around on Monday to uninstalling Visual C# 2008 Express and all its tangled mess of subcomponents. Once I did that I tried to install 2005 version. It complained at first because I already had a version of the .NET Framework 2.0 SDK installed from earlier. As a result I had to uninstall that in order to install 2005, apparently it includes the 2.0 .NET SDK already.

Using Visual Studio 2005 I opened up the World Wind solution and rebuilt it. I did not get any build errors but this has nothing to do with the version of Visual Studio.

It was confirmed that some other developer had checked in a bad version of the code including the wrong gdal_csharp.dll bindings. I had figured this out by looking at the SVN revision history for those dlls and comparing with the classes that actually referenced them. It took a while for people on the forum to respond, and other than one user nobody seemed to care that the build was broken.

Another disappointment was that I found from some posts that the World Wind SVN repository does not allow commits except for a select few users. I guess that makes sense, but I've never worked on an OpenSource project, so I assumed it was something like Wikipedia's model, where anyone can contribute, but moderators/admins could revert harmful changes to the code. I suppose Software is more tricky than encyclopedia articles.

Anyway, in the mean time to get back up to speed on C# and .NET I revisited some of my old .NET projects, including a Tetris game I wrote in 2003 using GDI+ graphics. I also downloaded a tutorial for creating a simple project that uses Managed DirectX to paint the background of a window different colors.