monodroid - bringing .net to android

There's one thing I really like with .net. And that's the hard work the guys over at novell do with bringing .net to all these non-windows platforms. I'm an old penguinista guy myself, actually since the day Red Hat released version 5.0. Thats.. a long time ago. I used to spend hours playing in the bash shell and developed small scripts in languages like awk, tcl, python .. and whatever the name was. I then started with Java for more serious applications, but at the same time got to know .net at work. Up until .net 3.0 I used to think Java was the superior, but today I don't. Perhaps because I'm using C# a lot more than Java, but I do feel that C# has evolved lightning fast while Java is kind of stuck. That is, of course, my personal opinion (and my grannys, not to forget)

Anyway, the Novell guys have brought .net to unix/linux/mac with the great mono project, and with monodevelop there's a nice IDE for all the hacking also. Now they've taken it even further with monotouch for iPhone and monodroid for the Android phones. Since I'm the proud owner of a HTC Desire, I simply need to take it for a spin.

So, I signed up for the beta, waited a day and downloaded the android-sdk for windows and installed the monodroid plugin for Visual Studio. Note that there are no tools for monodevelop yet, though it's clearly high priority to get one. I then followed the nice, you guessed right, "Hello World" tutorial over at their site, and voilá.

Pure art! And such an interesting world that evolves!