Novell has just announced that Mono for Android is now available. What exactly does it do? If you’re a developer who writes applications using either Microsoft’s .NET or C# programming languages then you now no longer have to learn how to write Android applications using that bastardized version of Java called Dalvik. Just wrap your mobile app up with Mono and boom, it’ll run. This is important because Mono is already out for iOS, so you can effectively write one application and deploy it on two different platforms with little tweaking. The dirty details: it’s going to cost you $399 per developer per year for a professional license or $999 per developer per year for an enterprise license. The difference between the two licenses? No idea.
People who work for major Fortune 500 companies will find this news exciting, but for the rest of us … either learn how to write your application using the native language of the device you plan to deploy it on or better yet write it in HTML5 and deploy it on your company’s intranet so that any device, even something running Palm’s webOS or RIM’s BlackBerry platform, can use your app. It’s what all the cool kids are doing, that and you don’t have to worry about making sure people have the latest version of your app or worry if sensitive data that lives in your company’s server farm gets leaked out in the open.
In other related news, if you care about learning Microsoft’s programming languages then you should pick up Silverlight. It’s what powers Windows Phone 7, will soon power the XBOX 360, and of course it’s bundled by default with each and every computer that runs the latest versions of Windows. There’s more of a future in that language than either .NET or C#, depending on what it is you plan to do with your app of course.