Why Mono for Android? -- Visual Studio Magazine

Why Mono for Android?

A new column on developing Android apps with the .NET Framework debuts. Here's the reason it exists, and a bit about the authors.

By Wallace McClure
04/25/2012

More Mono for Android Columns:

Better Debugging With Mono

Welcome to this Web column on Mono for Android. With apologies to my distant cousin Troy, I'm Wally McClure. You may remember me from such books as "Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C#", and "Professional iPhone Programming with MonoTouch and .NET/C#."

Author Greg Shackles and I will be writing this monthly column on Mono for Android programming. Greg is the author of "Mobile Development with C#: Building iOS, Android, and Windows Phone Applications." In this column, we'll explore Mono for Android and how .NET, and C#, developers can take advantage of Android, the most popular smartphone platform. We're always interested in your thoughts, what your interests are, and how this column can help you be more productive. Please reach out to us. The best way to do that is the various Mono mailing lists hosted by Xamarin, on Twitter at @wbm and @gshackles, or any other place that Google can find us.

Now a little about me (and I am never one to shy away from talking about myself): I'm a redneck from Tennessee that somehow found his way to Atlanta and Georgia Tech. I was somehow lucky enough to graduate from there twice with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. I've always loved things that were new and different, which led to my love of writing software (I started in COBOL and x86 asm), digging into Micrsofot's Web technologies, jumping whole-hog into the .NET Framework 1.0 beta, following in love with mobile way back in 1999, and a whole host of things I probably shouldn't have done but did anyway.

Somewhere along the way, I was contacted by someone representing a publisher that would eventually get purchased by John Wiley and Sons and folded into their Wrox division. Eight -- or is it nine? -- books later, I've run the gamut from software architecture, to scaling applications, ADO.NET, SQL Server, Oracle, Web, AJAX, the iPhone and Android. Unfortunately, I was kicked out of a 12-step program for recovering authors when I was caught with Microsoft Word open. I've worked for startups companies all the way up through U.S. Federal Government agencies. One thing I've learned is to trust what the marketplace wants and is buying: don't try to out-think the marketplace. This has led me to mobile, MonoTouch for the iPhone, Mono for Android, the books that I've written on them, and the applications I've created with them.

When not writing software, writing about software, or talking about software, I can be found playing golf, in the gym or coaching basketball.

Greg is a native New Yorker, and the more respectable one. He's originally from Long Island and now lives in Brooklyn. Greg has a B.S. in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics/Statistics, as well as a Master's degree in Computer Science from Stony Brook University. He's a Senior Software Engineer at OLO Online Ordering. Unfortunately Greg is a Yankee's fan, so my wife, the Red Sox fan, doesn't like him.

About the Author

Wallace (Wally) B. McClure has authored books on iPhone programming with Mono/Monotouch, Android programming with Mono for Android, application architecture, ADO.NET, SQL Server and AJAX. He's a Microsoft MVP, an ASPInsider and a partner at Scalable Development Inc. He maintains a blog, and can be followed on Twitter.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.