Question

I would like to have a cross platform framework as these platform solutions.
My application requires location service, socket programming, camera access and push notifications. So, the web app is not the way to go…. Is there any tools or framework to doing this? Thanks.

Answer 1

Because you want to access platform-specific features such as camera, GPS, notifications etc., you’re going to need to call platform-specific API’s.

As such, at least SOME of your app code will need to be platform dependent. However, there’s a good chance that a majority of your app’s code & logic can be shared across multiple platforms. I would STRONGLY recommend Mono as a great multi-platform development environment. On Windows & Windows Phone, your code will run in .NET. For Linux & OSX, you can use Mono. For Android & iOS, you can use Xamarin‘s tools.

The key here though is that if you package your app logic into “Portable Assemblies” (i.e. assemblies which take dependencies on parts of the .NET framework available across all implementations of the CLI/CLR), then your code can generally run without modification on Windows, Windows Phone, Linux, OSX, Android and iOS!

All you need to do then is build platform-specific shells that make your app look like a platform-native app using the typical controls and design metaphors of the various platforms you want to support.

HTH.

Update 2012-04-06: If you want to take advantage of Portable Libraries, here is some updated documentation on MSDN that refer to the newly updated version of Portable Libraries included in the recently released (and well-worth-a-look) Visual Studio 11 Beta.

Update 2012-04-11: A new article titled ‘Create a Continuous Client Using Portable Class Libraries‘ was published in the March 2012 edition of the MSDN Magazine that illustrates how to use PL’s to create an app for Windows Phone and Windows 8 that share the same core business logic.