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C# 2005 For Dummies®
by Stephen R. Davis and Chuck Sphar
Published by Wiley Publishing.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7645-9704-6

Overview
The C# programming language is a powerful, relatively new descendant of the earlier C, C++, and Java languages. Programming with it is a lot of fun, as you’re about to find out in this book.

Microsoft created C# as a major part of its .NET initiative. For what are probably political reasons, Microsoft turned the specifications for the C# language over to the ECMA (pronounced ek-ma) international standards committee in the summer of 2000, long before .NET was a reality. In theory, any company can come up with its own version of C# written to run on any operating system, on any machine larger than a calculator.

When the first edition of this book came out, Microsoft’s C# compiler was the only game in town, and its Visual Studio .NET suite of tools offered the only way to program C# (other than at the windows command line). Since then, however, Visual Studio has gone through two major revisions — Visual Studio 2003 and, very recently, Visual Studio 2005. And at least two other players have entered the C# game.

It’s now possible to write and compile C# programs on a variety of Unix-based machines using either the Mono or Portable .NET implementations of .NET and C#:

• Mono (www.go-mono.com) is an open-source software project sponsored by Novell Corporation. Version 1.1.8 came out in June 2005. WhileMono lags Microsoft’s .NET, just now implementing the 1.1 version that Microsoft released a couple of years ago, it appears to be moving fast.
• Portable .NET, under the banner of Southern Storm Software and DotGNU (www.dotgnu.org/pnet.html), is also open-source. Portable .NET is at version 0.7.0 as of this writing.