I experiment with a lot of open source software and I've noticed a fair amount of server type applications in the open source world use libevent to facilitate event-based processing rather than spawn multiple threads to handle requests.

I also do a lot of .NET programming (it's my core job function), and I'm interested in learning how libevent relates to the .NET event model. Are events in .NET the equivalent of libevent for C programs? Should I try to learn libevent and attempt to use it in custom .NET server applications or is using the standard .NET event model basically the same thing?