The nice people at the MonoDroid project have been kind enough to extend an invitation to the preview/beta program, and I am busy downloading as we speak (or as I type). Being able to eventually use the full feature set of .NET to create applications for Android devices is bound to give this a major productivity and quality boost, so I quite look forward to playing around with the software. The only drawback at the moment is that it requires VS 2010 Professional or above, and my MSDN subscription lapsed months ago, without me seeing a good reason to renew until now. Splashing out £850 + tax seems a little bit excessive, so probably the first thing I’ll get my hands dirty with will be to try and install MonoDroid on a VS 2010 shell. The documentation doesn’t mention it, which may be an oversight, or maybe it can’t be done; either way, we’ll know in a few days.
And as if this wasn’t enough, there’s also a whole new set of F# tools, that installs with the VS 2010 shell. No news in the compiler itself, apparently, but you’ll get the whole 2010 feeling, and .NET 4 functionality, for free. Not that F# 2.0 didn’t work perfectly well with VS 2008.
Now let’s say we have a shell with a working copy of MonoDroid plus an F# compiler, can we then program our telephones in F#? There are certain to be obstacles, but it’ll definitely be worth cancelling social life for a few months and find out.
And talking about F#, I just got notice that Don Syme will be talking at the London F# User Group in September. Not quite clear what about, though.
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