The Android bindings design

The core parts of Xamarin.Android are the bindings for the Android APIs. The Xamarin team focused a great deal in developing a consistent approach to create the bindings so that a C# .NET developer would feel at home when using them. This has resulted in a number of key benefits as follows:

• The Android API feels natural to a C# .NET developer and allows the developer to explore the API using the code completion and pop-up documentation from within the IDE
• C# developers can leverage the vast array of Java/Android examples and documentation that can be easily transformed for use with C# and Xamarin.Android

Design principles

The following are some of the key design principles for the Xamarin.Android binding. A complete set of design principles can be found on the Xamarin website:

• Allowing developers to subclass Java classes from the Android application framework
• Exposing a strongly typed API
• Exposing JavaBean properties as C# properties
• Exposing Java event listeners as...