Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C#

Chapter 10

Talking to Other Applications and Libraries

What's in This Chapter?

• Allowing Mono for Android to talk with other applications using intents
• Having your applications integrate with other third-party applications
• Accessing the Android Address Book

This chapter discusses the ways in which you can use Mono for Android to talk to other applications on the Android device, both those built into the device and those downloaded from the Android application stores. It also describes how to access the device's contacts and insert and edit contacts without having to rebuild a common UI.

The secret behind interfacing with any application on the device is the Intent method. This method handles where and what to open when you pass in an Intent and a Type or URI object for the method to know how to work with the intent. When the method is called, the app suspends in its normal fashion and carries out the appropriate action based on the information the intent has been passed.

Android Application Integration

This section shows you how to integrate Android built-in applications into your own application.

Opening the Browser

Opening a webpage in the native browser is a good place to start. The most likely reason for you to close your app and open the browser is because you want a website to be displayed. A user could then use the device's Back button to return to your application. As with most of the examples in this section, you can use this functionality by starting an intent as a new ...