You're just believing in MS propaganda. Yes, people created compilers and virtual machines for other platforms, but MS never considered this important. Their goal is to have only Windows as first class citizen in the .net world. If you write C# code you're tying yourself to a closed product that is restricted to a single platform.

>If you write C# code you're tying yourself to a closed product that is restricted to a single platform.

I've been using C# on Linux for well over a decade. And on embedded systems. Mono has shipped on various Linuxes for well over 15 years at this point. I've been able to write a single binary that runs on windows and on Linux, no recompile needed, for this long.

>You're just believing in MS propaganda.

Yes, one of us certainly has drank the koolaid.

No, he is right though. .NET was not only on Windows, but Windows CE as well. Later also via Silverlight.

You think of cross-platform as cross-vendor.

Not really. A single vender can be multi platform, for example Oracle. MS wants to propel their Windows platform. Windows can run on several types of hardware, but these are variations of the same thing.