Episode 148

Here's the last of K. Scott and Jon's interviews from NDC Oslo 2012: a conversation with Chris Hardy about Xamarin, MonoTouch, Mono For Android, and mobile development.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 148 - Chris Hardy on Xamarin, MonoTouch and Mono For Android

Show Notes:

• Jon asks Chris what he does at Xamarin.
• Jon asks about how the development experience works when building an application using Xamarin products and targeting multiple platforms (e.g. iOS and Android)
• Chris talks about how developers create the user interface layers - either using XCode, or just building the UI in code. He mentions PaintCode as a generator for user interface code.
• K. Scott asks about the process of sharing logic and service code between platforms.
• K. Scott asks how iOS and Android can call back into Mono code.
• Jon asks about the installation experience for setting up all of the Android development dependencies.
• Chris mentions that MonoDevelop supports Android UI design.
• K. Scott asks about interesting things people have built with Xamarin. Chris mentions rdio and iCircuit.
• Jon asks how developers handle platform specific issues while developing. Chris mentions several options for sharing code between platforms.
• Jon asks how things are working under the hood - is IL being deployed? Is anything being JITted?
• Jon asks about his opinion as a developer who works on all the main mobile platforms. Chris says he loves his iOS devices, but is interested in Windows 8.
• Jon asks about Chris' thoughts on the publishing process between platforms.
• Jon asks about the debugging experience - are you using emulators? How do they work? Do you get realtime debugging?

Show Links:

• Chris Hardy (blog, @ChrisNTR)
• Xamarin
• MonoTouch
• Mono For Android
• PaintCode 
• Portable Class Libraries in .NET