Mobile Development with C#

Write Once, Run Anywhere

iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, despite the fact that they are all mobile platforms, have very distinct ways of doing things and their own required languages in which to do them. iOS applications are written in Objective-C, while Android makes use of Java. Windows Phone leverages the .NET Framework, where the primary languages are C# and Visual Basic .NET. You can also use C and C++ on iOS and Android, but they are not currently supported on Windows Phone (see Table 1-1). As developers, we dread the idea of having to repeat all of our work three times in three different programming languages. Aside from the upfront overhead of doing the work three times, bug fixes found later on will also likely have to be fixed three times. For any non-trivial application, the technical debt can add up quickly, so the natural response is to seek out some sort of cross-platform solution to minimize the cost of building and maintaining applications for these devices.

Table 1-1. Native platform languages

	iOS	Android	Windows Phone
C / C++	X	X
Objective-C	X
Java		X
C#			X
Visual Basic .NET			X

The promise of a “write once, run anywhere” solution is nothing new in the development world. It tends to come around whenever there’s a need to publish applications on multiple platforms, whether on the desktop or on mobile devices. The mantra was originally coined by Sun when it was pushing for Java to be the unifying language for all platforms and devices. The concept is certainly not unique ...