I've written a simple GDI-based data plotter using C++/CLI but it's not particularly fast (some basic profiling indicates it's the rendering to screen that's the problem).
Is there any way to enable hardware acceleration for a UserControl or is there a .net interface for direct3D? ...or are there some other options I could consider.
We're using managed code so the solution really needs to be CLI compatible if at all possible.
[Edit] In case it helps, I'm rending strips (128 data points) of rectangles which are each 2x2 pixels using Graphics::FillRectangle - maybe there's a better way of doing that?
Managed DirectX has been deprecated for some time. You really don't want to use that. Instead, you should use SlimDX which is an open source interop layer for the DirectX SDK APIs written in C++/CLI. It is better than Managed DirectX and is supported by an expert community of developers. (I'm going to be working on improving the DirectWrite support with them soon.)