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Mono team ports Android to C#

The team behind the open-source Mono implementation of the .NET framework has released a port of Android to the C# language.
Written by David Meyer, Contributor

The team behind the open-source Mono implementation of the .NET framework has released a port of Android to the C# language.

Xamarin, the development-platform company that has been building on Mono since former sponsor Novell was bought by Attachmate, said on Tuesday that the release allowed coders to write Android apps using C# and the .NET virtual machine (VM), rather than having to do so with Java and the Dalvik VM.

The company even suggested that this may be a way around Android's current legal difficulties, specifically Google's epic court battle with Oracle over Android's Java implementation.

"Unlike Sun with Java, Microsoft submitted C# and the .NET VM for standardisation to ECMA and saw those standards graduated all the way to ISO strong patent commitments. The .NET framework is also covered by Microsoft's legally binding community promise," Zamarin chief Miguel de Icaza wrote in a blog post.

De Icaza said that, based on the idea that Mono provided a better-performing VM than Dalvik, the Xamarin team had set up a "small skunkworks project" called XobotOS, which aimed to create a machine translation of Android from Java to C#.

It accomplished this with a porting tool called Sharpen, a new version of which Xamarin has now released along with the C# Android port code.

Xamarin will feed some of the results of XobotOS into its own platform, de Icaza said. Examples include the ability of Mono for Android to avoid having to use Java to access underlying graphics libraries, and the option of replacing Java code in apps with C# code "where performance is critical and when C# can offer better solutions than Java has".

However, he added, Xamarin would not itself be taking the XobotOS project further.

"Our goal as a company is to provide the best platform for building mobile apps, and so XobotOS will not be a focus for us going forward. But it was a fun experiment to run, and as it turns out, a few technologies have come out of the effort that we'll be able to include in future versions of our products," he wrote.

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