[Tfug] .NET development and Ventrilo client under Linux

[Chris Martin]

I have been using Ubuntu as my primary OS since the beginning of the 
year, only booting into Windows when essential (primarily for playing 
games that don't behave under emulation). Two problems I have run across 
recently that have me booted into Windows significantly more frequently 
than I would like are programming a VB.NET application (not my primary 
choice) and running the Ventrilo voice chat program.

For the first, I have installed the monodevelop IDE-which appears to 
successfully import and build the solution-and the MONO framework, but 
it won't run.

For the second, my goal is to be able to have voice communication with 
my guildmates while playing World of Warcraft. WoW itself runs 
beautifully under wine (I actually get a better framerate than I do in 
Windows, I think that's due to the large number of background processes 
on my laptop/OEM specific version of the latter) but I don't get any 
sound. If I launch Ventrilo first, I can hear what people are saying but 
if I try to talk, horrible garbled noise comes out the other end. If I 
launch WoW first and then Ventrilo, I get no sound from either and still 
output noise in Vent. From the research I've done, the problem is tied 
to the fact that wine does not play well with Alsa and has to run 
through OSS, which does not support software sound mixing. I have tried 
to use the aoss wrapper but with no noticeable effect. I even went so 
far as to declare an alias in my .bashrc:
alias wine='aoss wine'

If anyone has any experience or advice for either of these I would 
greatly appreciate it

    Chris