Practical Mono offers you a detailed portrait of Mono and its many facets. You’ll learn about building GUI-based applications with Gtk#, database interaction with ADO.NET, and powerful applications with XML and web services.
By embracing this implementation, you can take advantage of the powerful development paradigm, building Internet-enabled cross-platform applications based on open source technologies. This book includes a primer on C#, so even if you’re a novice .NET programmer, you will still gain plenty from this practical guide.
Ever since the .NET initiative launched in January 2000 and the Visual Studio .NET beta subsequently launched in October 2000, the .NET train has been gaining speed; it now is the number-one development platform for the Windows operating system. However, you may have noticed a key point in that statement: for the Windows operating system! Yes, you guessed it: Microsoft targeted the .NET technology suite at the Windows operating system only; therefore, at the time of its launch, .NET was not available on other platforms such as Unix, Mac OS X, or Linux. This is not surprising, as Microsoft develops the Windows operating system and doesn’t want to invest time in creating versions for competing operating systems; however, in the corporate world, other operating systems exist and for good reasons.
In this chapter, you’ll learn exactly what .NET is and what it consists of; it’s important to note that Microsoft made a key decision that acted as the catalyst for the Mono project and ultimately enabled .NET to run on operating systems other than Windows. This decision was to submit the specification for a core component of the common language runtime (CLR) and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) to the international standards body ECMA International, an industry association “dedicated to the standardization of information and communication systems.” What does this mean? It means that anybody can obtain the specification for core .NET components and in doing so develop their own implementation of that specification, effectively writing their own .NET Framework components.
In addition, this chapter will introduce Mono and its associated elements including its tools and configuration. You’ll also take a brief look at integrated development environments (IDEs), which are graphical applications that make developing your application as little easier. Finally, this chapter will cover what you need to know about the sample application you’ll develop throughout this book, which is a fully functional RSS aggregator.
