Developing and Debugging .NET applications on Android with Mono(Develop)

Lots of cool stuff has been happening in Mono recently! First MonoTouch was released, which allows the development of iPhone applications in C#/MonoDevelop. The catch was that there was no debugger support. To address this glaring problem, Mono released created and released a Soft-Mode Debugger, which is basically an in-process debugger that lives in the runtime. After peeking at the code, I realized that porting this to make it work on Android would be a cinch! The result: you can now create a console application in MonoDevelop, deploy it to an Android emulator or device, and debug:

md-android

 

I blogged a while ago that I was working on an interop layer for Mono to allow it to utilize the Android SDK. This is mostly complete. Once I write up a tool to generate convenient wrapper classes, writing full blown applications for Android will become a reality!