Excerpts from book:

The SharpDevelop project started as a "one man show" in September of 2000, just a few months after
Microsoft released an Alpha of what was to become .NET 1.0 in early 2002. SharpDevelop is Mike
Krüger's brainchild, and he got started because he was disappointed with current programming
languages, and did want to try out the new programming language C#. As there was no really good
programming editor aside from betas of Visual Studio .NET – which he didn't have access to – he just
started to program what he needed.

The SharpDevelop core team – who wrote this book – consists of programmers who came aboard
during the Beta of .NET because they wanted to see how "real" Microsoft's new platform was and how
good or bad an experience it would be to program with it. Your best bet to learn a new platform is to
test it with an ambitious "proof of concept" project, and that is what SharpDevelop initially was:
pounding .NET and C# to see if it is viable in real-world applications.

Today, SharpDevelop is a full-featured Integrated Development Environment that leverages the features
of C# and .NET, and we can say that both met or exceeded our expectations for building powerful realworld
applications.

Over the course of more than two years of development, we learned a lot about this platform. This book
is about sharing our experience in building real applications using .NET and C#. You will learn about
design issues and decisions made, techniques and technologies used, as well as background information
on features of SharpDevelop that you won't usually find in everyday applications.

SharpDevelop is an evolving open-source application, with new features being added over time that are
not covered in this book. The code accompanying this book is available on the Apress web site.
You can always get the latest C# source code from http://www.icsharpcode.net/ ,compare it with the
code for this book and learn how code evolves and how we and our contributors implement new features.