Mono for Android 1.0 Released -- Visual Studio Magazine

Mono for Android 1.0 Released

By Michael Desmond
04/07/2011

Novell yesterday released the production version of Mono for Android, a set of tools and plug-ins that enable .NET developers to write applications for Android-based devices. The Mono for Android 1.0 installation includes a Java SDK, an Android SDK and a Visual Studio 2010 Plug-in, which can be downloaded here.

Previously known as MonoDroid, Mono for Android 1.0 requires Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher to use the Visual Studio Plug-in. Novell says it intends to add support for Mono for Android to its standalone MonoDevelop IDE, which will enable .NET coders not using a compliant version of Visual Studio to develop Mono apps for Android.

According to documentation from Novell, Mono for Android consists of "the core Mono runtime, the Mono for Android bindings to the native Android APIs, a Visual Studio 2010 plug-in to develop Android applications and an SDK that contains the tools to build, debug and deploy your applications." Developers can deploy applications to hardware or the Android simulator, or distribute them via Android Application Stores.

Currently, Mono for Android only supports C#-based development. Novell says it intends to enable Visual Basic development, once it has updated the Mono Visual Basic compiler to run using the Mono for Android mscorlib.dll. The company said no timeframe was established for Visual Basic development support.

Developer Perspective
Wallace "Wally" McClure is a partner at Scalable Development, Inc., a Microsoft MVP, and author of two books on Mono-based development for the iPhone. He said the Mono for Android 1.0 release has impressed him.

"It has support for .NET 4, which developers are using. It has support for Web services, databases, Android services, and many of the features that developers will expect," said McClure, who went on to praise the Visual Studio integration. "Overall, I have found this to work very well. I am able to write an Android application and run it in the emulator or on a device and see what is happening fairly easily. The only plug-in that I use is SVN and Mono for Android integrates with it perfectly."

However, McClure said that debugging integration remains "problematic," with users reporting poor performance and timeouts in Visual Studio. "I suspect that the debugging will improve shortly -- similar to how MonoTouch (the tool for Mono development for iPhone) initially shipped with no debugging support, and about six weeks afterwards the Mono team shipped an update with debugging support."

Pricing for Mono for Android is $399 per developer for the Professional Edition and $999 per developer for the Enterprise Edition

About the Author

Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Poisson Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demo of Poisson regression, where the goal is to predict a count of things arriving, such as the number of telephone calls received in a 10-minute interval at a call center. When your source data is close to mathematically Poisson distributed, Poisson regression is simple and effective.
Cloud-Focused .NET Aspire 9.1 Released

Along with .NET 10 Preview 1, Microsoft released.NET Aspire 9.1, the latest update to its opinionated, cloud-ready stack for building resilient, observable, and configurable cloud-native applications with .NET.
Microsoft Ships First .NET 10 Preview

Microsoft shipped .NET 10 Preview 1, introducing a raft of improvements and fixes across performance, libraries, and the developer experience.
C# Dev Kit Previews .NET Aspire Orchestration

Microsoft's dev team has been busy updating the C# Dev Kit, a Visual Studio Code extension that enhances the C# development experience by providing tools for managing, debugging, and editing C# projects.
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.