Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Mono for Android

mono-android.png

Now that we feel that we have fixed all the embarrassing bugs in Mono for Android, so we have opened up our Mono for Android preview program to anyone that wants to take it out for a spin.
Mono for Android brings the full Mono VM to Android. We use a library profile that is better suited for mobile devices, so we removed features that are not necessary (like the entire System.Configuration stack, just like Silverlight does).

In addition to bringing the core ECMA VM to Android, we bound the entire set of Android Dalvik APIs to C# and in the process C#-ified them. This includes using C# properties for metadata (less XML config file messing around), exposing C# events, C# properties, strongly typed generic types where necessary, implicit conversions where needed, using the C# API style, IEnumerable where appropriate (to let you LINQ over your Dalvik, and we turn IIterable into IEnumerables for you).

On the OpenGL front, we brought the same OpenTK library that is popular among .NET developers on both Windows, Linux and iPhone, so you can share the same OpenGL logic across all platforms.

Read more: Personal blog of Miguel de Icaza