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Mono for Android Ships, Now .NET Developers Can Build Android Apps
Novell has announced the general availability of Mono for Android today, the solution that lets developers use Windows technologies like C# and .NET to build Android applications. We previously reported on Mono for Android's launch in January of this year, when the preview program opened up for testing after the biggest bugs had been fixed.
Now, Novell is licensing the platform commercially, starting at $399 per developer per year.
Mono for Android complements Novell's MonoTouch project, released in 2009, which allows developers to build apps for Apple iOS devices using the same programming languages - C# and .NET. Developers using both platforms can now save time by sharing code between iPhone, iPad, iPad Touch, Android (phones and tablets), plus of course, Windows Phone 7, Windows PCs and Windows Servers.
Included with Mono for Android is the core Mono runtime, bindings for native Android APIs, a Visual Studio 2010 plugin and an SDK (software development kit) containing the tools developers need to build, debug and deploy their apps. Plus, with an included add-in, MonoDevelop users can develop on OS X. (MonoDevelop is an open source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows).
In addition to the $399 Professional Edition license, an Enterprise Edition is also available for $999 per year, which includes enterprise deployments, maintenance and updates. There's also a five-developer Enterprise license which is $3,999 per year. Existing MonoTouch users can take 50% off their purchase of Mono for Android for a limited time, says Novell.
You can learn more about Mono for Android here, check out the installation guide, tutorials, the API, the API Design, Mono for Android's architecture and the list of class libraries that are part of Mono for Android.
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