Mono for Android

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.

Unlike iOS where the JIT is not supported, Mono on Android supports the full JIT, so you can use Reflection.Emit and dynamic code compilation as much as you want.

This initial release only comes with templates for C#, but other .NET compilers should work, as long as they reference Mono for Android's libraries (as we removed a few methods that make no sense on mobile devices).

Support for OSX

Through the lifetime of our preview program, Mono for Android only supported Windows development using Visual Studio. Today we are also releasing support for developing Android applications on MacOS X using MonoDevelop.

Getting Started

Please check our Welcome page, it contains installation instructions, links to tutorials, mailing lists, chat rooms and more.

I strongly advise our users to join our mailing list and to check the previous discussions on the mailing list for some tasty insights.

You can also browse the API that we expose to C# developers.

Upcoming Features

We are working as fast and as hard as we can to complete Mono for Android. This includes Linux support and bringing MonoDevelop to Windows, for users that can not run Visual Studio 2010 Professional.

Giving us Feedback

Please provide your feedback on the product directly on our mailing list, as this is what the MonoDroid developers monitor. Bug reports should be filed on Novell's Bugzilla.