From the edifice of the American judicial system through to the liberal coven of the open source community, it's a widely accepted fact that Microsoft's business is to write software that's tied to its' Windows operating system. Although Windows is often disparaged by unbelievers as being technically inferior, difficult to use, and expensive, by consistently coupling its software products to the operating system, Microsoft grew into one of the most successful business empires the world has ever seen.

Although Microsoft bet the company on .NET, they also had the foresight to present .NET's core technology as open standards through the international standards organizations ECMA and ISO. Apart from making .NET development easier on Windows, the standardization of the Common Language Infrastructure (the fundamental .NET technology) and C# (the primal .NET language) means that .NET is not just suitable for Windows development, but is also a practical solution for developing software that runs on a variety of operating systems, including GNU/Linux and Mac OS X

Cross-Platform .NET Development

Since .NET is primarily seen as a Windows development tool, and most .NET developers are from a Windows background it seemed only right that a book be written to investigate how .NET can be used as a cross-platform development tool. With this in mind M.J. Easton and Jason King wrote Cross-Platform .NET Development (ISBN: 1-59059-330-8), which was published in September 2004 by APress.

If you're interested in Windows development, .NET development or cross-platform development then the book serves as an exposition into the technicalities of Microsoft's .NET Framework and the open source implementations of .NET that position it as the ideal cross-platform tool for the new millennium.