MonoDroid - Mono for Android Beta Program

by Miguel de Icaza

We are hard at work on MonoDroid -- Mono for Android -- and we have created a survey that will help us prioritize our tooling story and our binding story.

If you are interested in Monodroid and in participating on the beta program, please fill out our Monodroid survey.

Here is what you can expect from Mono on Android:

  • C#-ified bindings to the Android APIs.
  • Full JIT compiler: this means full LINQ, dynamic, and support for the Dynamic Language Runtime (IronPython, IronRuby and others).
  • Linker tools to ship only the bits that you need from Mono.
  • Ahead-of-Time compilation on install: when you install a Monodroid application, you can have Mono precompile the code to avoid any startup performance hit from your application.

We are still debating a few things like:

  • Shared Full Mono runtime vs embedded/linked runtime on each application.
  • Which IDE and OS to make our primary developer platform. Our options are VS2010, VS2008 and MonoDevelop and the platforms are Windows, OSX and Linux.

    We are currently leaning towards using VS2008/2010 for Windows during the beta and later MonoDevelop on Linux/Mac.

Like we did with MonoTouch, we will bring developers into the preview in batches of 150 developers, please enter enough information on the "comments" section if you want to be in the early batches.

Posted on 21 May 2010