Novell set to cruft up Android with .Net applications
Mono to allow mobile-cross platform app dev for iOS, WinPhone7 and Android
Do you remember as a kid getting a brand new pair of sneakers that were blindingly, ephemerally, preternaturally bright, shiny white and shiny and beautiful when you walked out of the shoe store?
Did you avoid wearing them outside for a while just to keep them perfect and pretty?
Remember how painful it was to finally scuff them up and watch the shine disappear under dust or mud or things you'd rather not think about, as you walked down a sidewalk that you had always thought was a lot cleaner than that?
Novell is doing that to Android.
Today it announced a version of a dev tool that will run .Net applications on hardware that, until now, has been able to run fast and clean, crash and recover without having to deal with the cruft and file corruption that comes with apps built originally for Windows and converted by brute force to run on other platforms.
An upcoming version of Novell's Mono development tool will let coders build apps using C# and .Net Framework 4 to run on Android.
The Android-enabled version of Mono will work only as a plug-in for Visual Studio 2010 Professional, or with the lite version, the free MonoDevelop.
Other versions of Mono build apps for iOS and Windows Phone 7, but that hardly seems like enough of a justification for letting it infect Android as well.
"Code it once and share among several platforms," said Tiago Reis, senior developer at Cardmobili in an InfoWorld story.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. App dev productivity; app migrations; multi-platform app dev support. Keeping up with the latest platforms; expanding the scope of corporate mobile app development.
Blah, blah, blah.
Plenty of good reasons to run common corporate app dev tools to Android.
It still won't look as good after they scuff it all up.
