I was very pleased to get an invite to the MonoDroid (Mono tools / environment for Android) beta earlier in the week, so in addition to a few v2 commits I’ve been playing with shiny new toys.
Wow; decent reflection!
Initially I made the mistake of thinking that MonoDroid would have the same reflection limitations as (say) MonoTouch. I even tied myself in knots trying to get around them! Then Jb Evian pointed out that actually MonoDroid can do full meta-programming at runtime! That is a huge plus for me… so; whack in a few conditional-compilation symbols and – wow! It works!
A taster
Don’t get too excited – this is only going to be brief…
Only intended to show something working, but here is v2 on MonoDroid, compiled at runtime, round-tripping some trivial data.
A small (but significant) step. Actually, the time taken to compile the model and run it the first time is still a bit slow for my liking – not sure if that is the emulator, the beta, or a general JIT issue – I’ll dig more and investigate rebasing further.
And of course as a fallback, I can still use runtime usage without “emit” – it is noticeably slower, but still works.
Again, without an actual device it is hard to gauge typical performance at this point, but I’m pretty hopeful.
So… if that works, what are you waiting for?
I still need to finish v2; some decent commits lately now that I’m all refreshed. The finishing line is within sight… oh, and MonoDroid needs to be released ;p
