This evening I spent a number of hours chasing my tail. All I wanted to do was to debug the very simple Android application. I figured all I would have to do is go ahead and purchase MonoDroid (you can only debug using the emulator with the evaluation license, which is painfully slow and periodically breaks). Unfortunately this was not the case.
It turns out that my Samsung Galaxy S which is less than a year old is running Android v2.1 which is too old for the MonoDroid toolkit. I then spent the next hour fighting Samsungs poor excuse for a desktop application, Kies. It doesn’t help that the new version (v2) isn’t compatible with their less than a year old devices. I then managed to locate an older version (v1.5) which was compatible but for the life of me I couldn’t get my device to connect to the software. Finally after tweaking all sorts of things I got it to connect only to discover that the software didn’t have an update for my Galaxy S. ARGH.
Ok, back to basics – lets just get a cooked ROM and apply that. Sure enough I found instructions on how to a) root my Galaxy S and then to b) install Android 2.3.3:
How to Root Samsung Galaxy S
http://www.pathikshah.com/blog/root-samsung-galaxy-s/
Install Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread on Samsung Galaxy S
http://www.pathikshah.com/blog/install-android-2-3-3-gingerbread-on-samsung-galaxy-s/
After doing all that I now have a device I can debug to from Visual Studio 2010 using MonoDroid. This is way way way too painful, but to be expected from Google and Android.