I was working on ast_mono tonight, and had to make some decisions on how the ManagedAsterisk API would handle formatted (printf style) functions.

First, there's technical issues. printf functions use varargs. I'm not exactly sure on how to forward and prototype these methods. I know IL supports varargs, but I don't think that C# does. So, I'd end up doing a “params object[] args” parameter. The issue is that my unmanaged runtime is then massed a set of pointers, and would have to figure out what each item is to be able to format it correctly. Still, it's possible.

Then the real issue comes into play. .NET APIs don't use printf style functions. To many .NET programmers this style would seem foreign, and clash with other APIs. Since one of the goals of ast_mono is to present an API that's consistent and feels like any other .NET library, this is unacceptable. So, instead, I'm doing to use string.Format to handle the formatting for these functions (such as ast_log). Yes, the functionality is somewhat different, but overall it should provide a much better development experience to ast_mono users.