Apress' open source series of books recently unveiled Mark Mamone's "Practical Mono", a book targetting new .NET developers. We take a quick look at the book below.
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Member since:2005-07-28
Member since:2006-01-01
I am not mister de Icaza but or Larry Ewing (creator of F-spot), but I will take a stab at this. F-Spot and other great Gnome# applications that are making it big in Linux now days rely a lot on underlying technologies that are platform specific to GNOME and even lower level pieces that only exist in *NIX. We have just began to make parts of Gnome# available on Win32.
Gtk# the UI library framework written in C# that makes writing GTK GUI applications with ease, makes extensive use of a feature of .NET/Mono called Platform Invocation (PInvoke). This means that although when you are writing your applications you are doing it using C# semantics, at runtime there are plenty of calls to unmanaged function calls that may not exist yet on Windows.
In time we will have full parity or very close to it (97% is good enough?) with Windows, Mac OS X and others, but until then the folks taking full advantage of mono/Gtk#/Gnome# are taking advantage of Linux. Should you? 
Member since:
2005-07-27
Well, you do not have to upgrade because the various frameworks are backwards compatible. That means that all the work that you do today will continue to work tomorrow.
This also means that you can adopt new technologies when you are ready, not when someone tells you that you must upgrade.
The .NET 3.0 stuff is looking interesting, but its intended for early adopters, those which are interesting in providing feedback. you are not forced to use the new features in C#.
So yes, .NET 2 was on beta for two years, which I think is a good idea as many people could provide feedback on the process: what was broken, what could use tuning, which kinds of features were missing. It was a pretty good beta in my opinion.
miguel