“Many .NET developers, accustomed to Microsoft’s Windows-only
development tools’ capabilities, are quite surprised when they
learn that .NET is platform-independent. But it’s true. You can
compile and execute .NET assemblies on operating systems other than
Microsoft Windows. Currently, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX, and numerous
flavors of Unix/Linux can be happy homes for your .NET
binaries.“Even after developers are made aware of .NET code’s
cross-platform capabilities, they often assume that the scope of
platform-independent .NET development is limited to little more
than ‘Hello World’ console applications. Here’s the reality. Today,
you can build production-ready assemblies that make use of ADO.NET,
Windows Forms (in addition to alternative GUI toolkits such as
Gtk#), ASP.NET, and XML Web services…”