Cross-Platform .Net Development: Using Mono, Portable .Net, and Microsoft .Net

Okay, I got this book mostly to get into issues common to cross platform development. With focus on say, cross-platform gui libraries, and other cross-platform libraries. In that I was a bit disappointed, but I was very happy to see how many somewhat advanced design principles were covered, and the breadth of this book. I am hoping that they expand into at least a companion book on maybe the Tao libraries, GTK#, wx.Net and other cross-platform libraries for front-end/interface coding. I've also been reading the Nantz book for "Open Source .Net Development" and found it to be even more broad, and more shallow. Hopefully we will see some books that cover a bit more depth on fewer topics, and more specifically towards open-source cross platform libraries. It is definately a good book, and covers a lot into the hows, and why's, but not so deep in any of the topics covered that you get a solid grasp on anything beyond design principles... This gives it a Four-Star rating in my book. It's worth a read for a mid-level developer looking to branch out into more serious development, or a development manager looking for better organization into development (cross platform or not). Don't expect to walk away comfortable on any of the tools that are mentioned in the book.

Cross-Platform .NET Development Using Mono, Portable .NET and Microsoft .NET is a guide written especially for professionals. Expert .NET programmers M. J. Easton and Jason King explore the three most popular .NET implementations and demonstrate how to build a powerful cross-platform software using their framework. Flowcharts, examples and sample code lay out all aid in clarification of complex principles of organizational superstructure that will save labor, time, and money. Chapters address common cross-platform pitfalls, using GUI toolkits, incorporating native code, strategies for testing and building, and much more. An enthusiastically recommended resource especially for anyone pursuing, building, or studying for a career in the field.

Microsoft and cross-platform?! Sounds like an oxymoron. Yet the book shows how .NET has given rise to this. The key step was Microsoft transferring the specifications of C# and .NET's CLI to ECMA and ISO. This lets third parties write compilers that produce IL bytecode and thence to assembly in a given hardware. So you could write C# code on some platform, like linux. Then with Mono or Portable.NET, produce x86 binaries. The authors describe the open source Mono and Portable, and compare these with Microsoft's own .NET offerings. They show that Mono and Portable are quite functional. For example, using Portable, you can write in Java, C#, C or VB.NET and compile. The book goes into some moderate level of detail about CLI. But if you are a programmer in C# or C, say, and you just want to get native binaries, without wanting to know about CLI, the book is still useful. You can safely skip the CLI sections, without losing the gist of what you need to know. For many of us, whatever language we use, we don't need or want knowledge of a specific assembly language.

I prefer this book to the Mono : Developers Notebook which was also recently published. This book provides a much wider angle view on the .NET cross platform development space. For example, the developers note book covers TK#, this book covers TK# and #WT. This book is much more architectural in design than the Developers Notebook. So if code is your thing then you may want to evaluate both. I personally prefer architectural perspective because in this case it's more about choosing a direction of development as opposed to learning the structure of the TK# library, which is interesting, but can be gleaned from the online documentation. This is a must have book for anyone who wants to take their .NET code beyond the confines of the Windows operating system. It's well worth the price of admission.