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INTRODUCTION

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

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#:

1. Mono (www.go-mono.com) is an open-source software project spon sored by Novell Corporation. Version 1.1.8 came out in June 2005. While Mono 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.

2. Portable .NET, under the banner of Southern Storm Software and DotGNU www.dotgnu.org/pnet.html), is also open-source. Portable .NET is atversion 0.7.0 as of this writing.

Both Mono and Portable .NET claim to run C# programs on Windows and a variety of Unix flavors, including Linux and Apple’s Macintosh operating system. At this writing, Portable .NET reaches the greater number of flavors, while Mono boasts a more complete .NET implementation. So choosing between them can be complicated, depending on your project, your platform, and your goals. (Books about programming for these platforms are becoming available already. Check http://www.amazon.com/.)

Open-source software is written by collaborating groups of volunteer programmers and is usually free to the world.

Making C# and other .NET languages portable to other operating systems is far beyond the scope of this book. But you can expect that within a few years, the C# Windows programs you discover how to write in this book will run on all sorts of hardware under all sorts of operating systems — matching the claim of Sun Microsystems’ Java language to run on any machine. That’s undoubtedly a good thing, even for Microsoft. The road to that point is still under construction, so it’s no doubt riddled with potholes and obstacles to true universal portability for C#. But it’s no longer just Microsoft’s road.

For the moment, however, Microsoft’s Visual Studio has the most mature versions of C# and .NET and the most feature-filled toolset for programming with them.

If all you need is C#, I’ve included a bonus chapter called “C# on the Cheap” on the CD that accompanies this book. That chapter tells you how you can write C# code virtually for free. (You’ll be missing lots of amenities, including the nice visual design tools that Visual Studio 2005 provides, but you can write Windows code without them, especially the kind of code in this book.
Bonus Chapter 5 explains how.)

Note:Two authors wrote this book, but it seemed more economical to say “I”
instead of “we,” so that’s what we (I?) do throughout.