Why aren't there any decent audio libraries for .NET?  Don't get me wrong, it's nice that the framework supports some audio features in a very simple way if you want to just play something.  However, if you need access to the audio data to manipulate it in whatever way or just want to know the duration, play location, audio ...

Have you ever needed to populate a listview with thousands of items?  I have and lemme tell you, it's not the highest performing thing around.  The only built in mechanism to help you out is to turn of the updating of the screen during the population.  However, after seeing the same question posted by Luke Huttenman, a couple of people provided ...