choice between win32 APIs and .NET framework

Question

I have to develop an application for windows that will enable controlling the mouse through web cam by recognizing hand gestures. I will be using vc++ 2008 for development. But

Answer 1

.NET is nice for GUIs and for general programming in non-performance-intensive areas. If you need to do anything more than a trivial GUI, I would suggest writing at least that part in a .NET language.

In what you've described of you program, recognizing hand gestures is going to be the only computationally intensive part. The actual process of controlling the mouse is trivial. So as long as the gesture recognition part performs well enough for your needs, it probably won't matter what the rest of the program is written in.

First step, you should research what libraries are out there that do gesture recognition or similar image processing. (I would hope that you're not intending to write that part from scratch anyway.) If you find any .NET based libraries that claim to have performance good enough for your needs, then you could give them a try. Otherwise, you would probably end up with a library based on C or C++ or similar. Either way though, it's possible to integrate such a thing with a .NET-based program.