Review - Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C#

Mike Riley of Dev Pro Connections Magazine has a review of our Mono for Android book.  You can read the full review on their site

Mono for Android has been available for more than a year. The documentation for the product is adequate and has been improving over time, but until recently, finding a good book about the technology was difficult. Such a constraint has been lifted thanks to Wiley's Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C#. Written under the Wrox imprint by several contributors (Wallace B. McClure, Nathan Blevins, John J. Croft, Jonathan Dick, and Chris Hardy), the book is one of the most comprehensive and helpful Mono for Android titles currently on the market.

Please buy 8-10 copies of our book for the ones you love, they make great romantic gifts.

Xamarin Designer for Android Article

The latest version of Mono for Android includes a long-awaited design surface. Learn how it works.

It's interesting to look at the needs of various segments of developers. When I first start looking at an environment, the first thing I need to understand is the UI. I'm not magically born with some knowledge about the environment and don't learn well by just reading, so I need some help in getting started. I found this was true when I started Windows based development in the early 1990s, Dynamic Web in the late 1990s, ASP.NET in 2000, Silverlight/WPF, iPhone and Android.

I find that getting up to speed with a UI is the single biggest deterrent for someone learning a platform. I find that as a beginner I need the features provided by a design surface. It's only as I grow and become comfortable with a platform that I find that building a UI by hand is more productive. Even as I get more advanced, I still can learn from a designer, so it has value as I grow into a platform.

I hope that this article helps you as you dive into Android Development.

Cross-Platform Mobile Development With Mono for Android and MonoTouch

Many years ago, in fact pre-Java, I remember a hallway discussion about the desire to write a single application that could easily run across various platforms. At the time, we were only worried about writing applications on Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7.x. There were many discussions about windows, user interface concepts, and specifically a rather long discussion as to whether Mac users would accept a Mac application that didn't have balloon help. Thankfully, the marketplace answered this question for us with the Windows API winning the battle.

A similar set of questions is currently going on in the mobile world. Unfortunately, at this point in time, there is currently no winning API and none currently in sight. What's a developer to do? Here are some questions that developers have (and there are many more):

• How can mobile developers target Android and the iPhone with the same code?
• How can .NET developers share their code across Android, iPhone and other platforms?
• How can developers give applications the look and feel of the specific platform and still allow as much code as possible to be shared?
• Mobile devices share many common features, such as cameras, accelerometers, and address books. How can we take advantage of them in a platform independent way and still give the users the look of every other application running on their platform?

In this article, we'll look at some solutions to these cross-platform and code-sharing questions between Mono for Android, MonoTouch and the .NET Framework available to developers.

Xamarin Designer for Android Webinar - Recording

Here is some info on the recording of the webinar that I did last week for AppDev regarding the Xamarin Designer for Android.

Basic Info: Android user interfaces can be created declaratively by using XML files, or programmatically in code. The Xamarin Android Designer allows developers to create and modify declarative layouts visually, without having to deal with the tedium of hand-editing XML files. The designer also provides real-time feedback, which lets the developer validate changes without having to redeploy the application in order to test a design. This can speed up UI development in Android tremendously. In this webinar, we'll take a look at UI Design in Mono for Android, the basics of the Xamarin Android Designer, and build a simple application with the designer.

Here is the link:

http://media.appdev.com/EDGE/LL/livelearn05232012.wmv

I think it will only play in Internet Explorer.  Enjoy!

Xamarin Designer for Android Webinar - Webinar via AppDev May 23

I'll be doing a Webinar on May 23 on the Xamarin Mono for Android Designer that is new with Mono for Android 4.2.  This is a free webinar presented by AppDev, please attend if you can.  Here is some info on the webinar:

Android user interfaces can be created declaratively by using XML files, or programmatically in code. The Xamarin Android Designer allows developers to create and modify declarative layouts visually, without having to deal with the tedium of hand-editing XML files. The designer also provides real-time feedback, which lets the developer validate changes without having to redeploy the application in order to test a design. This can speed up UI development in Android tremendously. In this webinar, we'll take a look at UI Design in Mono for Android, the basics of the Xamarin Android Designer, and build a simple application with the designer.

Video Training - Android Advanced Development Using Mono for Android 4

This course is about how to use Mono for Android with Tablets and the new Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich release. The course introduces Android Tablets and Fragments, new controls that are available through Android 4.0, new application programming interfaces in Android 4.0, and new features available in the Google Android SDK Release 17 that can improve their development experience. This course also contains a module on the Android Design Experience, what developers can use to improve the user experiences, design suggestions from Google’s Android team, and some thoughts on how to improve the design experience via software code.

eLearning event on HTML5 for Mobile with jQuery Mobile - May 17

I'll be doing an eLearning event on HTML5 for Mobile with jQuery Mobile. There will also be a few items sprinkled in on ASP.NET Razor. 

Mobile development is a hot item. Customers are buying iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and many other mobile computing devices at an ever increasing record pace. Devices based on iOS and Android are nearly 80 percent of the marketplace. RIM continues to be dominant in the business area across the world. Nokia's growth with Windows Phone will grow on a worldwide basis. At the same time, clearly web development is a tremendous driver of applications, both on the public Internet and on private networks. How can developers target these various mobile platforms with web technologies? Developers can write web applications that take advantage of each mobile platform, but that is a lot of work. Into this space, the jQuery Mobile framework was developed. This eLearning series will provide an overview of mobile web development with jQuery Mobile, a detailed look at what the jQuery Mobile framework provides for us, how we can customize jQuery Mobile, and how we can use jQuery Mobile inside of ASP.NET.

Link: http://elearning.left-brain.com/event/mobile-web-development