More Progress on Writing Android Applications in Mono

Mono on Android: State of the Union

Having mostly finished up my surprisingly successful ROM Manager and ClockworkMod Recovery, I finally turned my attentions back to androidmono. Though Miguel recently announced the MonoDroid project, there's still room for a open source/hobbyist version. :) (And I need something to work on when I am bored)
When I put the project down a few months ago, I had very rough bindings to the Java API. I recently dumped the approach I took (albeit very cool), in favor of using jni4net. jni4net is a similar project that allows embedding a JVM into Microsoft's CLR, or vice versa. It only took a little bit of tweaking to make it work on Dalvik with Mono (I also hacked off a lot of unnecessary stuff that jni4net provides). So the following file:



Gives you this activity:

(Note: the code above is being displayed from my github repo and may change and leave the image out of date.)
I hacked up a Java/C# project to reflect on the Android SDK jar and create a C# android project that binds to the Java APIs via JNI. So, how it sort of works:
  • Create a class library and start coding up your services and activities.
  • Create a matching Java project (using the Android template as found on github) that uses the same namespace as your C# project.
  • Create "native" method stubs for all the overridden methods on your C#/Java doppleganger types. See here for an example.
  • The native methods get bound to the C# implementations at runtime automagically at runtime.

  • There's still a lot of work left to do: MonoDevelop template and plugin, a tool to create Java dopplegangers for each C# object via reflection, soft debugger support, translating Java's "OnSomeEvent" interfaces into true C# events/delegates, convenence extension methods, support for constructors (a Java constructor can not be "native"), and more. I wouldn't even say this is in Alpha stages yet, but it *works*.