Novell's Mono Brings .NET Applications to Android

Recently, Novell announced the launch of Mono for Android, a tool that enables the development of Microsoft .NET applications for Google's mobile platform using Microsoft Visual Studio.

The addition of Mono for Android to Novell's existing Mono development tools offers Microsoft .NET and C# developers who use the Visual Studio and other environments to enjoy a common code base for coming up with applications for various mobile OSes.

The company enables the development of such software for devices like Android-based smartphones and tablets, Apple iPad, Apple iPhone and Apple iPod Touch.

“Since the introduction of MonoTouch in 2009, developers have experienced how Mono streamlines mobile application development,” said Miguel de Icaza, Mono project founder and vice president of Developer Platforms at Novell.

“As a result, many asked us to build a similar tool for Android. We developed Mono for Android to give both individual developers and businesses a way of sharing their code across multiple mobile platforms, increasing efficiency and reuse of their C# and .NET expertise across the board.”

Mono for Android includes the core Mono runtime, a Visual Studio 2010 plugin that can be used for the development of Android applications, bindings for native Android APIs, and a SDK that includes all of the necessary tools for developing apps.

Developers who are familiar with Microsoft's Visual Studio would be able to continue using their skills and .NET code, as well as the available libraries, tools, and C# programming knowledge, for coming up with appealing apps for Android.

“With Mono for Android, .NET developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) can utilize Visual Studio and their existing skills to build a vast array of Android-based applications and sell their products into this massive market,” Novell notes.

Through using Mono for Android and MonoTouch, developers can save both time and money through sharing the code between iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android phones and tablets, not to mention Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform, or the desktop OS from the company.

Mono for Android was made available for download both for Windows and Mac OS X computers, and can be found available on Softpedia too, here and here, respectively.