Android App Development with MonoDroid using.NET framework in Visual Studio

The craze of smart phones is increasing day by day. Many people in the world use Smart Phones as they are portable, good looking, have high RAM and memory, high processor speed, good support for wireless and wifi and many more. iPhone, Android , Windows Phone 7 are some examples of smart phone. Among them android is most popular. It is because, it is open source, availability of large numbers of applications, large number of mobile company deploy it, large developer community and many more. So large number of mobile application developers are interested in Android Application Development. In this article, I focus on the Android App Development for C# .NET programmers using MonoDroid.
Android APP Development is mostly based on Java VM “Dalvik” with Eclipse IDE.
Many Java programmers are targeting the platform now days. There are good documentations available for the Java developers on the internet. But what if you don’t know Java and are expert in C# .NET. ?? It is so boring, isn’t it? You have spent a lot of time in .NET so switching to Java is not so good idea. You are familiar with Visual Studio and each of its component and toolbox so, learning Eclipse waste your significant time. Now all you want is use your skill in .NET and build android app so that without knowledge in Java and Eclipse you can make your application in a platform you are familiar with. If you have similar problem, don’t worry :), here is the solution.
Considering the interest of .NET pro in Android App development, Novell (now xamarin) has stepped into this job. It has introduced a product MonoDroid, which is actually a plug – in for Visual Studio to develop android app in .NET.  Mono is an open source implementation of .NET framework and it provides a large number of APIs. The product MonoDroid contains :
  • A plugin to Visual Studio 2010 which support developer to deploy app in Emulator as well as physical devices.
  • The mono runtime.
  • And large numbers of libraries that integrate .NET with android and Java APIs

You can download this Mono for android trial version here. Go to the link and choose the Mono for android for windows. Then installer downloading process automatically begins. In my next article, I will discuss how to configure MonoDroid in Visual Studio 2010.