I am looking to integrate a hand evaluator into my current poker
software. A lot of the actions of my poker player were essentially
hardcoded for the final rounds of play of texas hold'em hands. I am
looking to improve its play and be able to get the value of five card
hands.

I have seen sites like these:

http://www.suffecool.net/poker/evaluator.html

But was unable to translate that C code into C# or VB.NET because of
my meager knowledge with bitwise operations. I was wondering if anyone
has a good algorithm or some good code for evaluating hands.

I would like to be able to pass a five card hand to a function and
have it send a back a numerical representation of the hand exactly
like the below code. Does anyone have any ideas?