Rankspike

First it came, it saw, now it conquers .. yes I’m talking about the Android OS, latest version is called HoneyComb now in 3.1 as of this writing. A lot of you wonder how to develop android applications for mobile or tablet, well there are two ways, one is if you have some Java programming under your belt since Android is pure Java, the second option which is a popular one is ASP.NET specifically C# language. You say what? yes you can now use your Visual Studio to develop Android applications and deploy it to Android Market Place.

So how does this fit together  since  Microsoft Visual Studio does not support such framework (android) ? Through an open source effort called Mono it is now possible to develop applications in Android using your knowledge and skills in ASP.Net C# in particular.

Here’s how it works, Xamarin created a tool that recognizes the Asp.Net frameworks and compiling them together with Java namespaces, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, this is no pure Asp.Net programming, you will have to use Android namespace to access the rudimentary components needed to run android apps.

Xamarin created a template for Visual Studio 2010 (express not included) so you can start developing after once it’s installed. To see how it’s installed here is a quick link from Xamarin’s website http://android.xamarin.com/Installation/Visual_Studio.

The major question now that’s swirling in your mind is that, is this tool for free? hmm.. we wish “yes” to all question that saves us some dough and NO it’s not , you can try it for 30 days but after Mono for Android will expire.

With this available tool developers can use their existing C# asp.net combo skills and reuse code and libraries that have been built with .NET, while taking advantage of native Android APIs.

For more tutorials and documentation visit Xamarin website.