Hi all,

I'm a longtime but highly intermittent NatSpeak user who is finally going
to bite the bullet and jump into NatSpeak 9. I cannot afford Pro, so I was
hoping to get Preferred and use Natlink for scripting. However, I am
dismayed by the Natpython requirement of the .net framework, because I use
a 3rd-party program to cut Internet Explorer out of Windows at a fairly
low level. As a result, the .net framework is out of the question for me.

I had hoped that since Natlink is written in C++, I wouldn't need .NET to run it, and I have found out from the kind folks on the NatPython mailing list that .NET is only necessary for installation. The obvious solution would be for me to volunteer my time to write installation routines for NatPython that don't depend on .NET, but unfortunately, while I'm am a fairly decent scripter, this is definitely over my head. I've never written a stand-alone Win32 application; I've
always used scripting languages that run on clients that mediate between
me and the OS (e.g. JavaScript and Flash ActionScript).

Learning from scratch to 1) write Windows installation routines, and 2) do it in a language new to me (C++), involves a learning curve of rather more than a couple of hours, I would imagine, and at the moment I don't have much more time than that to devote purely to learning something (let alone
doing the actual programming afterward). So is the standalone version at Joel Gould's site,
NatLink007, working with DNS 9.5? It's old enough that it surely doesn't require .NET, but is it too outdated now?

If it makes a difference, I'm running a dual-boot system with Win2000 and XP. My OS of choice is 2000 because it's leaner and I have more control over it; I use XP only for a single application which won't run on 2000.

Thanks,
Mike