Before You Begin Developing

Before getting started with development, you need to learn about a number of items that will help you understand the development environment and the tools that are involved. This section covers what Mono is and how it is implemented. Then it discusses what Mono for Android is, along with its benefits and implementation. Finally, this section discusses the development stack before moving on to development.

What Is Mono?

Mono is an open source project sponsored by Xamarin to create an Ecma standard implementation of the .NET common language infrastructure (CLI), a C# compiler, and an open development stack. The Mono project was started by Ximian in 2001, and version 1.0 was released in 2004.

Mono Implementation Goals