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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T20:14:21+00:00

I am about to start building an app that will be used across all

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I am about to start building an app that will be used across all platforms. I will using monotouch and monodriod so I can keep things in .net

I’m a little lazy so I want to be able to reuse as much code as possible.

Lets say I want to create an application that stores contact information. e.g. Name & Phone number

My application needs to be able to retrieve data from a web service and also store data locally.

The MVVM pattern looks like the way to go but im not sure my approach below is 100% correct

Is this correct?

  1. A project that contains my models
  2. A project that contains my views,local storage methods and also view models which I bind my views to. In this case there would be 3 different projects based on the 3 os’s
  3. A data access layer project that is used for binding to services and local data storage

Any suggestions would be great.

Thanks for your time

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Not specifically answering your question, but here are some lazy pointers…

    • you can definitely reuse a lot of code across all 3 platforms (plus MonoWebOS?!)
    • reusing the code is pretty easy, but you’ll need to maintain separate project files for every library on each platform (this can be a chore)
    • MVVM certainly works for WP7. It’s not quite as well catered for in MonoTouch and MonoDroid
    • some of the main areas you’ll need to code separately for each device are:
      • UI abstractions – each platform has their own idea of “tabs”, “lists”, “toasts”, etc
      • network operations – the System.Net capabilities are slightly different on each
      • file IO
      • multitasking capabilities
      • device interaction (e.g. location, making calls etc)
    • interface abstraction and IoC (Ninject?) could help with all of these
    • The same unit tests should be able to run all 3 platforms?

    Update – I can’t believe I just stumbled across my own answer… 🙂 In addition to this answer, you might want to look at MonoCross and MvvmCross – and no doubt plenty of other hybrid platforms on the way:

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