http://brahma.ananthonline.net/static.php?page=static061128-020520

that's the new Brahma-FX Project on SourceForge

The download section seems to contain Doc file only, I really don't get the main purpose  of this project, does handling of vertex and pixel shader are done by the the graphic  API you'll using wheater it is OpenGL-GLSL,DirectX-HLSL or XNA-Fx file. If it is just another shader generator why not just use the one created by Graphic card vendor  itself such as NVIDIA - RenderMonkey Toolsuite, it is a rich shader development environment for  both programmers and artists which facilitates the collaborative creation of real-time  shader effects. full support for the latest DirectX(9.0c) and OpenGL(1.5) shading languages. Tho I prefered to write my own simple effect file without using any shader generator.

that's exactly the reason why the project was started: so you won't have to program directly against the tool created by graphics vendors and tying yourself to a particular shader implementation (like NVidia's).

The .NET platform was chosen for its cross-platform ability

cross-platform or cross-language?

both.

Brahma intends to support Mono (non-Windows platforms) and OpenGL though I don't know if it's already supported now.

Ah the source was there, Lol, compiled and run smoothly, yep according from readme, this eliminates the need for programmers to learn a shading language, cool ! and It contains project files for different type of graphic API such as DirecX, XNA and OpenGL. It is cross platform since it is now possible to develop  and run applications written in C# on Linux using CLR from Project Mono and DotGNU. and theres a downlodable Mono Framework Mono/C# and Cocoa# for Mac OS X .

Well, Visual3D.NET now has own implementation, which WORKS and doesn't parse IL. It provide fast code generation on-the-fly and caches compiled shader's microcode, so you could prebuild all possible combinations of input conditions (like #defines in pure HLSL) and run those shaders without compile even single line of HLSL code. Moreover, this approach (call it #SL) allow developers to use entire set of OOP features provided by C#/.NET 2.0, like generics, interfaces, virtual method calls, if/for/while operators etc. in order to achieve maximum reusability and consistency within your shaders written in C#. By now, this toolset (codegen, base Shader class, basic 'HLSL' types and service classes) is used internally by Visual3D, in order to replace Ogre-like materials and increase performance by grouping multiple passes together etc, but you can see nice "Use C# shaders" checkboxes in several areas of Light Demo Scene in the latest release (beta 1.2.3). P.S. this is not a joke, check it out yourself: http://www.visual3d.net P.S(2) it's already a part of V3D SDK, and you can play with #SL by creating own RenderMaterial-based class and using Shader-derived shaders in it. You can see examples of ready-to-use materials in Reflector (by now), lookup for AmbientMaterial, PerPixelMaterial and EnvMapMaterial in Visual3D.Graphics3D namespace of Visual3D.Engine.dll; all shaders which are used there are contained in Visual3D.Shaders namespace and are derived from BasicShader class (which derives from Shader class) and in Visual3D.Shaders.Extensions namespace. P.S(3) remember about copyright etc ;)