Question

I’m a developer, with years of experience in C# as well as Java.
I have developed a few ADT projects for my Nexus One Android 2.23 phone.

I am considering further mobile development and I heard of Mono for Android/iOS and Xamarin. At first I thought Mono would recode to Java, but now I understand that it compiles to native C code and runs over mono libs.

So I was wondering how much bloat does this add to apps, as I believe size of download is directly linked to number of downloads (I myself sometimes don’t download something due to it being > 1MB)

If there is someone here who uses Mono I would love to hear from your experiences.

I understand there is a Visual Studio 2010 Plugin for Mono. Do you recommend it?

Answer 1

So I was wondering how much bloat does this add to apps, as I believe size of download is directly linked to number of downloads (I myself sometimes don’t download something due to it being >1MB …. )

Monodroid apps are usually somewhat around 5 Megabytes (if Linked) because the runtime is embedded in the app.

If there is someone here who uses Mono I would love to hear from your experiences.

All in all i’m pretty happy with Monodroid. Java tutorials on Android are easy to translate or if too big you can create Bindings. I’ve only done one project on Mono so my experiences are limited but thus far i’ve expected nothing that would make me regret my choice. On the other hand, if you’re familiar with Java (and like coding in Java) their is no reason to switch over except for Cross Plattform apps (see Monocross).

The VisualStudio plugin is necessary to develop in VisualStudio. The new version comes with a Layout Designer like the Android Eclipse plugin. I’d recommend you download the trail version from Xamarin and try it (the trail has no expiration date, it lets you only deploy to an emulator)