Anyone know of a good .Net Chess Engine

Not an engine as such, but Valil.Chess is a good .NET chess game (with source code available - so you can get to the "engine" of the game) which won the Nov 2004 Submission Prize at Code Project.

There is also SharpChess, which is also a complete chess game, written in C#.

As for general Chess engines that could be converted to .NET, there are many available, and depending upon the challenge, you could pick and choose from lots of engines to implement within .NET. A good starting point list is here and also shows the Elo Rating of each engine. Even a re-implementing of the server-side of the FICS would certainly represent a challenge! :)

I write a Computer Chess Blog that takes you through all the steps of writing a chess engine in C# from scratch, it includes a computer chess links section and a chess game starter kit.

http://www.chessbin.com

Adam Berent

The SharpChess Engine code (C#) is available here:

Search Engine Source Code