Why the .NET version of ArcGIS Runtime?

You may be wondering why this book is focused on the .NET version of ArcGIS Runtime. Well, for starters, many Esri users like .NET, especially C#. Another reason is that if you know Java and Android, you'll find it easy enough to read the C# code because Java and C# are similar. Another important reason is that Esri has released 3D first in the .NET SDK, so it was hard to pass up this opportunity to talk about one of my favorite subjects (3D). ArcGIS Pro will also be based on .NET, so hopefully some of the skills you learn about here, especially Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM), will also apply to Pro. Furthermore, there seems to be a general sense that Visual Studio is a great Integrated Development Environment (IDE), as opposed to Eclipse, NetBeans, Google's Android Studio, and the other IDEs, but that's just my opinion. This is not anything against those IDEs, I just prefer Visual Studio. Very soon Esri is going to release the Xamarin® support, which means that the developers will be able to write an app in Visual Studio, compile it natively, and run it on Windows, Windows Store, iOS, and Android. I suspect you'll agree with some of these and disagree with others. Regardless, I hope that by the end of this book, you will have a solid understanding of the API so that you can move to any other SDKs, and it will be just a matter of switching your brain from C# to Android or to C++ or to Java.