Free Ebook on C# Programming

christophw writes "The programmers of SharpDevelop (better known to the /. crowd will be its sibling MonoDevelop) together with the publisher Apress made the book Dissecting a C# Application - Inside SharpDevelop available as a freely downloadable PDF document (no, no registration required). So if you want to judge for yourself if one can build an application of scale with .NET (or Mono for that matter), you now have a 500+ pages book for the holiday reading season (or the virtual bookshelf)."

Comments

Re:Yeah, right

[Decaff]

For many of us, it's not a case of being pro- or anti-Microsoft, it's a matter of simple business sense: Having only a single supplier for a technology has never been considered a sensible strategy in any area of business - with the strange exception of IT. Perhaps there is a mistaken sense that much software is always short-term and temporary, so it doesn't matter if the neat and friendly development system you use comes from only one company, and runs on only one platform.

Well, I was using Turbo Pascal on Windows a decade ago. Now I'm developing for companies which have rolled out Linux desktops!

Using .Net seems very short-sighted to me.

Re:Don't get it

[LiENUS]

I developed a .Net application without cross platform in mind at all, and immediately it ran under DotGNU's Portable.NET. and microsoft has expressed an interest in alternative implementations of .NET. according to the Mono faq at http://www.mono-project.com/about/faq.html#msft

Question 38: Is Microsoft helping Novell with this project?

There is no high level communication between Novell and Microsoft at this point, but engineers who work on .NET or the ECMA groups have been very friendly, and very nice to answer our questions, or clarify part of the specification for us.

Microsoft is interested in other implementations of .NET and are willing to help make the ECMA spec more accurate for this purpose.