## In search for the one solution to rule them all (for mobile dev)…

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Once upon a time I discovered Adobe Flex, and toyed with the idea of building mobile apps with a single code base and have the ability to publish it to iOS and Android. It was all going great until I tried hooking up web services and databases which was inefficient and very challenging.

I wasn’t giving up but then Adobe Flex became Apache Flex and all of a sudden all the Flex developers I knew were abandoning ship in favor of HTML 5 and/or native mobile development.

So back to square one.

**The PhoneGaps of the World**

As an Adobe Cloud subscriber, PhoneGap was the immediate next option that popped up but this option uses JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and that again was not what I was looking for.

And following suit, along came several other similar offerings which jumped on the HTML/JavaScript bandwagon, but again, I was looking for an alternative to this.

**Landed on Xamarin and Mono**  
The journey has brought Xamarin to my attention, and at the moment I am discovering its capabilities during the 30-day trial.

Xamarin uses Mono, the open source implementation of the .NET framework and allows you to write code in C# and uses wrappers for Android and iOS so you can use C# to invoke the other frameworks in a very convenient way.

You also have the option of using a standalone IDE, or using a Visual Studio plug-in.

The premise and the promise are pretty ambitious, plus it’s not a cheap option, especially if your business is not making money.

**I would love to hear about your journey, and also about your experience with Xamarin.** _Please drop us a note on Twitter [@inerdtia](http://twitter.com/inerdtia) or directly to me [@alejandrormz](http://twitter.com/alejandrormz), and feel free to comment here._

_\* The Apache Flex logo is property of the flex.apache.org._