Are there significant libraries or toolkits for that task? Or other existing code? Use the language that is compatible with them. On what platforms should the program run? It is possible to write protable code with C++, but not with Visual Basic.

Also consider which language you or your colleagues are most familiar with. Generally, if these are the only choices I'd recommend C++. It's in my opinion better suited for numerical tasks and widely supported on all platforms.

Did you consider Python? In my opinion it's more handy than C++ if computing performance is not critical. The numerical and scientific libraries (numpy, scipy, matplotlib) are quite useful, too.

thanks Mr. Weber......

I agree with Mr. Weber in recommending C++ and Python due to their wide spread use in technical computation and wide range of high quality libraries. If you are starting the project from scratch I would definitely recommed Python due to it´s faster learning curve and power.

But if you or your team already have expertise in Visual Basic.net and your application will be for Windows platform, I would recommend sticking with Visual Basic.net.

Actually, Visual Basic.net is part of the .net framework allowing it to use any library writen for .net framework. This allows you to use libraries writen in managed C++, C#, Visual Basic.net, IronPython, among many others.

One interesting free tool from Microsoft Research is Sho (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/sho/) for technical computing resembling Matlab. It can be embedded in your .net application to provide high quality graphics and powerful mathematical tools.

Thank you so much Mr. Vidal

Please the Microsoft free tool you are talking about, is it Dundas Chart?

Hello Mr. Shadrach,

I was talking about Sho. This tool more akin to Matlab, Octave and Scilab as it's an environment for scientific computing and data analysis. It's not as powerful as other tools I mentioned, but has the advantage of being seamlessly embedded in .net applications. The core of these tools is mathematical computation with a vast collection of addon libraries for specific functions like fast fourier transforms, neural networks and time series analisys. Their plotting and rendering capabilities are very good and extensible, but high quality presentation comes at a higher cost than chartting oriented tools as Dundas Chart.

Dundas Chart and its more recent incarnation, Dundas Dashboard, are not free products. Microsoft has acquired Dundas Chart and released part of its controls as Microsoft Chart Controls for .Net Framework 3.5 and later as built-in control in .NET 4.