Precision timing in .NET

Question

I've just seen this question, where one of the answers indicates that System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch should only be used for diagnosing performance and not in production code.

In that case, what would be the best way to get precision timing in .NET? I'm currently in the early stages of building a very simple MIDI sequencer using the MIDI-out functionality of NAudio. I'd like to be able to send MIDI messages out aligned to (say) 1/10s with as little jitter as possible. Is this feasible, or will things like context-switching ruin my day?

I currently have some code in a console app that continuously calls Stopwatch and calculates the jitter when generating a stream of 1/16th-notes at 150bpm. The jitter is very low in this situation. However, I'll be moving this off to another thread, so I don't know if that will remain the case.

Answer 1

If you don't mind P/Invoke, you can use QueryPerformanceCounter: http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20021111.asp

Answer 2

You could also use the native streaming MIDI API. I don't think its in NAudio but you could look at the C# Midi Toolkit to see if that one supports it. Otherwise you have two examples of how to do native MIDI API P/Invoke and can roll your own...

Answer 3

Windows multimedia timer states that it allows "applications to schedule timer events with the greatest resolution (or accuracy) possible for the hardware platform."

The application it uses as an example is a MIDI sequencer.