A company called Xamarin has announced that it has ported the Java-based Android operating system over to C# and the .NET framework.

Xamarin, the folks that created the Mono open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, are at it again. This time, they've managed to port parts of Android to Microsoft's C# language.

Xamarin is furthering its mission to make C# the mobile-development language of choice by allowing iOS coders to use Microsoft's Visual Studio.

The results? Xamarin ran a series of benchmarks and found that Android actually runs faster on C# than it does on Java. Xamarin has released the source code for their new version of Android.

Xamarin, the current care takers of the Mono project, have released a prototype of Android with the Java virtual machine completely removed. In its place is the Mono for Android version of the CLR ...