Personally, I've found the JUCE framework to be fairly clean and really nice for setting up simple MIDI effects: http://www.juce.com/learn/tutorials-code-exampl

Personally, I've found the JUCE framework to be fairly clean and really nice for setting up simple MIDI effects: http://www.juce.com/learn/tutorials-code-examples/create-basic-audio-midi-plugin-part-1-setting-up http://www.juce.com/learn/tutorials-code-examples/create-bas... If you really cannot stomach C++, though, VST.NET ( https://vstnet.codeplex.com/ https://vstnet.codeplex.com/ ) is meant to let you do audio plugins in .NET languages - couldn't get it to work myself, though.