After much searching here and on the web, it turned out that I'm not the only one who needed to be able to play individual midi notes. It also turned out that as far as .Net is concerned, there isn't that much info available.

However, I managed to scrape up some bit and pieces and cobbled together a small app to handle the job. You can select any midi instrument, select the pitch of the note you want to play and set the volume of the note. I didn't bother with adding in any ability for selecting a midi channel so it uses channel 0. I also didn't bother with realtime pitch and volume shifting nor any selections for note duration.

You can download a file of the VS .Net 2005 project here: MidiNotes (http://www.tachyonburst.com/downloads/vbcode/midinotes.zip)

or you can view/download all the code for the form: FormCode.txt (http://www.tachyonburst.com/downloads/vbcode/FormCode.txt)