Xamarin developer tools reach Android 4.0, tablets

Xamarin, a company seeking to extend Microsoft's .Net programming technology beyond Microsoft's operating systems, has released a version of its developer tools that can work with the latest version of Google's Androidoperating system.

The company builds Mono, an open-source version of Microsoft's .Net technology for programming in Microsoft's C# language. With the newest version of Mono for Android, C# programmers can produce software that will run natively on both Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, and onAndroid tablets including Amazon's Kindle Fire and Samsung's Galaxy Tab, the company said yesterday.

The Android developer tools dovetail with the company's MonoTouch to lower the difficulties of writing software for multiple operating systems. "In many cases, you can reuse most of your existing code when porting from Android to iOS," Xamarin promises. The software also can reuse existing libraries of pre-written .Net code.

Mono for Android costs $399 for the professional version for a single person, $999 for the enterprise version for a single seat at a customer organization, and $2,499 for the enterprise priority version that includes faster support response. A free version lets programmers build software, but only run it in emulation mode on a developer's computer rather than on actual devices.

Xamarin has its roots in Ximian, which Novell acquired in 2003 but then later dropped the work after Attachmate acquired Novell in 2010. Ximian's two leaders, Chief Technology Officer Miguel de Icaza and Chief Executive Officer Nat Friedman, reunited as Xamarin co-founders in 2011 along with Chief Operating Officer Joseph Hill, who's worked on Mono since 2003.