Want to run your .NET app on an Android phone? Thanks to Novell, now you can.
Novell (NASDAQ:NOVL) this week announced Mono for Android. Mono is the Novell led open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework. The new Mono for Android effort follows Novell’s previous MonoTouch effort which enables .NET for Apple iOS devices.
Novell’s development team had some technical challenges that they overcame in order to deliver Mono for Android. One of the key challenges stemmed from having two VM’s in order to run .NET.
Dalvik is the processor virtual machine in Google Android. Miguel de Icaza VP, developer platforms at Novell explained that C# code runs on top of the Mono VM and the Mono VM is sharing the address space with the Dalvik VM.
“This allows C# code running on Mono to call into the existing code in the Dalvik VM,” De Icaza told InternetNews.com. “This is important because all of the UI elements, device-specific APIs, audio, GPS and other APIs are only exposed in Android as Java/Dalvik APIs.”
