sorry for replying in top level. Turns out, there is a slight misbehavior in piston that I haven't noticed until this post. Will fix it ASAP.
Does anyone know of any work being done on steem related projects using .NET on Windows?
I don't think there is much done with .NET for graphene/steem. But an RPC is probably all you need to get things started. Shouldn't be too difficult to either tune one or use an existing one.
I know javascript fairly well, and jQuery. But haven't worked with Python and although I have Ubantu on a VM and an older computer, I haven't done much on the OS.
I used to code MATLAB and only started working with python 2 years ago. Since then fell in love with Python. It's easy to use, easy to read and very powerful.
If not, I'll have to study this most excellent Piston.Rocks project, and try to translate, or maybe use it as a communication layer with the Steem blockchain.
Don't hesitate to drop me a line if you run into any problems!
I notice they all are talking to the Steemit public websocket api at wss://steemit.com/ws
Well, that socket API is under heavly load. I would recommend to use the one mentioned in the above link instead. At least until that one is under heavly load aswell :)
I am familiar with using GET and POST to talk to web APIs, so talking to this websocket might be similar, but I need to research that.
Websockets can be used in a similar way and most coding langauges have a library to at least use RPC over websockets.
Some language, however, even support websockets as a full and can use it in an asychronous way to listen to server-initiated communication, but I don't think the notification part is even integrated in the Steem backend.
I also see mention of using a Steemit API such as
var Api = new client(options);
in the Steem RPC library; but then in other places on here, I have read that there is NO Steem API. SO I'm confused about that!
It depends what an API is for you. Technically, the steem daemon offers an RPC endpoint that can be used as an API to query the blockchain (the one that is offered as websocket connection).
The cli_wallet of steem also offers an API to connect applications to it.
You may want to read into the bitshares API because it is build on the same foundation.
There is one thing special about piston and that is that it does not require a cli-wallet running to post/reply/do stuff on the blockchain. Piston can create and sign transactions cryptographically the same way as the cli-wallet does. The code is based on what I have written for BitShares already and it took me years to finish it (as it used to be a side-project).