Mono for Android preview arrives, get .NET on your Android

A preview program for Mono for Android has just opened up, allowing developers interested in getting .NET running on Android-powered smartphones an opportunity to take it for a spin.

Following a long internal development period, “we feel that we have fixed all the embarrassing bugs” writes Miguel de Icaza, who heads up the Mono project. The entire Mono VM is available to developers on Android, omitting a few features that aren’t necessary or of any use on a mobile device. The given example is that System.Configuration is unavailable; much like it is in Silverlight.

There has been impressive work put in to making the development experience as fluid and intuitive as possible for C# users. Events, properties, and metadata properties are all exposed in the manner you are used to in C#, as the team “C#-ified” the Dalvik APIs in Android. Support for OpenGL is also available, as in JIT compilation (which is not on iOS).

Currently only C# is supported but other languages that run on Mono “should work”, and support for development on Linux and Windows with MonoDevelop is on its way (OS X support arrived with this release). So jump in and sign up for Mono for Android today.

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