Chapter 2

Introduction to Mono for Android

What's in This Chapter?

  • Introduction to Mono and Mono for Android
  • Configuring the development environment
  • Mono for Android tools for Visual Studio
  • Debugging and deploying

What is Mono for Android? This chapter provides the basis for Mono for Android development. It starts with an overview of Mono and then moves to a discussion of Mono for Android, configuring the development stack, and developing and deploying a “Hello Mono for Android” application — first to an emulator and then to your Android-based phone.

Before You Begin Developing

Before getting started with development, you need to learn about a number of items that will help you understand the development environment and the tools that are involved. This section covers what Mono is and how it is implemented. Then it discusses what Mono for Android is, along with its benefits and implementation. Finally, this section discusses the development stack before moving on to development.

What Is Mono?

Mono is an open source project sponsored by Xamarin to create an Ecma standard implementation of the .NET common language infrastructure (CLI), a C# compiler, and an open development stack. The Mono project was started by Ximian in 2001, and version 1.0 was released in 2004.

Mono Implementation Goals

The Mono implementation is currently targeting three goals:

  • An open source CLI
  • A C# compiler
  • An open development stack

The CLI provides the runtime environment for languages that have been ...

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