MonoDroid is a software product developed by Novell to build Android based mobile applications using C# and .NET. To install and work with MonoDroid, you need Visual Studio 2010. MonoDroid works as an add-on of Visual Studio 2010. Once installed successfully, the MonoDroid project templates are available in Visual Studio 2010. MonoDroid does not work with Visual Studio Express.
Downloading the Xamarin Installer
http://www.xamarin.com/Download
Nice! You are about to download Xamarin Starter edition so you can develop cross-platform apps in C#
Once you have successfully installed the Android SDK, MonoDroid and all required software, you are all set to build your very first Android based application using C# and .NET.
Hello Android!
We are going to build our very first Android based application. In this application, we will display the Hello Android text on the screen.
Open Visual Studio 2010 and create a new project. Select Visual C# as the language, MonoDroid as the category in the left side bar list of the project template categories. See Figure 1.
Once you select the MonoDroid category, you will see the following three templates.
- MonoDroid Application
- OpenGL MonoDroid Application
- MonoDroid Class Library
