Getting Started with Development

C# as I'm sure you know need the .net library installed on the host computer. This isn't a very common thing to see on most computers. It will work provided that the .net is installed but if not it won't work and I doubt people will appritate you installing on their computer.

Unfortunately, C# and the .NET Framework are impossible (otherwise very hard) to portableize. Simply because not all computers have that exact same version of .NET, and not all PC's will be able to run it . Try some other language, please. There is a portable version of .NET (with viruses). Anyway, when writing a portable program, just make sure everything stays in it's own folder or a specified folder. Nothing in the registry. And welcome to PortableApps

Well, it's not quite as dire as the previous comments imply. .Net can actually be fairly frugal with registry usage, keeping a lot of settings in ini files and such. I think it will let you define those things fairly readily, to keep settings and files off the host PC. Feel free to experiment.

The problems cited are quite real, though. The resulting program is likely to present issues for distributing it from an Open Source site, and there really are lots of machines where the right .Net runtime is not present.

But that probably won't stop you from learning a lot, or having a program you can run portably for your own purposes on machines you control (so you can make sure the right runtime is installed).

On the other hand, there are other programming languages...