[Touche]

.NET isn't native code.

[cwyers]

There are multiple native compilers for .NET. Xamarin uses one for iOS and Android apps (well, in the case of Android, you're compiling to Dalvik bytecode, but it's just as native as any other Android app).

[sochinochi]

Xamarin.Android apps do not compile to Dalvik bytecode. Every app ships with MonoVM which runs side-by-side with Dalvik.

[cwyers]

Thank you for the correction; I seem to have had Xamarin on Android confused with Xamarin on iOS, which does compile to native code.[1]

1) http://docs.xamarin.com/guides/ios/advanced_topics/limitatio...

[CmonDev]

Of course it is not. It's a framework. C# on the other hand can compile to native. This is how it works on iOS.

[visualR]

No but you can wrap native UI libraries, the most critical piece that needs to be native. Contrast this with an HTML CSS UI.

[Touche]

You can wrap native UI libraries with just about every language in existence. That's not what people usually mean when they say "native" though. I think they mean precompiled to a binary for a specific architecture.

[visualR]

yeah you can. The whole native vs non native is about whether the UI is native and directly integrates with the platform, not the language or whether there is a runtime.

[Touche]

Err, well the article is about using Mono with GTK, which is not native outside of Gnome.

[visualR]

That's why you'd use monomac, mono touch or wpf on osx,iOS and windows, respectively. Xamarin also has a solution for android.