Step outside the world of Microsoft

This will be my first post in a series of "how-to" posts when stepping out of your standard coding realm of the Microsoft .NET platform and into coding for other smart devices including Java on the Android.

As you know, .NET has provided a terrific base for coding on windows based applications.  Although as I have seen the mobile phone market grows, I have noticed that Microsoft is severely lacking in functionality and options in the mobile phone realm.  This led me to begin a programming venture to convert my old .NET applications over to the Android platform.  At first, I thought, how different can it be?  Well the answer is, if you have a firm grounding in programming and understand the why’s to what you do, it is not as difficult as you may think. 

First, forget the .NET namespaces, they will not help you here, or they may, it depends on how you view languages.  For me it was just a change in syntax and event handling that was the hardest to grasp.  Once you get the basics, the rest is just natural.  In the upcoming posts, I will be showing you how to interact with WCF web services, creating a UI, and many other useful things, like IO operations and web client requests.

I recommend starting on Google to find answers to your immediate questions.  Getting used to the development environment was the hardest part for me, but one you step outside of Visual Studio, a whole new area is opened up for you to take advantage of the new devices abound in the market place today. 

Tomorrow I will show you how to take a common task of writing a file to disk and adapt it to the android system!  Stay tuned.