Recommendations for C#-ish developer regarding smooth transistion to Android?

Question

finally my old Nokia broke down just hard enough to justify buying a new proper phone, an Android!

In a way I'm glad it's taken me this long to obtain a "layman-hackable" phone; I doubt I could have resisted developing funny bits of this&thats on a smartphone with time needed spent elsewhere...(would have had mad skills in Windows Mobile 3.0 (if it exists)) though...

Sorry, I digress; which is also at the the root of my question.
I am well versed in .NET, and after having some on-again off-again relationships with the regular assortment of open source languages, I've come to the conclusion that I need my Visual Studio, simple as that.

So...if I want to develop for the Android, I obviously must make some sacrifices, but is Java really the only truly supported language for "ordinary" Dalvik (best.name.ever.by.the.way), or is there any other way?

After having been forced Java at school, I would like to avoid it as much as is "reasonably" possible.... the Python crowd always seem to be totally surfing around and above the curb, and Python I love! If not already, how long is it reasonable to wait before they get some Android capabilities in there ;-) ?

Any recommandations anyone, I really can't stand being soooo close to being able to make my phone act the way I think is sensible....after all these years.....

Update:

Thank you all for your interest, even though you demoralized me to the point that my weekend was spent alternating between cursing, rebooting for path-updates et. al. (I have a terrible tendency to dabble in exactly the wrong place while waiting for long drawn installations...), and most of all re-discovering why I didn't really consummate my love for development until after leaving school...(and started working as a developer ;-)

Bah, more of an Uplate than an Update, been a long, frustrating weekend...not the joyous adventure I had planed for my little robot buddy....it just made my soul weep to learn that Sun's download pages still make not sense, just neck ache. Will sort this all out tomorrow, the mythical man month my a** ;-)
Again, thanks and cheers!

Houston, we are ready for take off!

A very real difference between your pet projects and those that pay the bills, is having the luxury of letting tech mature and just do some other cool stuff while you wait for the prereqs to get themselves into order.
Seems MonoTouch has what it takes. I no longer have an Android, so I haven't tried it for myself, but if Wally McClure [says it's so], in an all round interesting interview, I felt I should put the links in.

Now...how to get C# to make my Symbian FaceTweeteer do some Linq to GPS...

Answer 1

Java is the only way (currently) to create a full Android application. As previously mentioned, there is an Android Scripting Engine and some hacking around with other languages - but if you actually want to write a non-trivial application with good performance and release it anytime soon... crack open a Java book.

I remember reading a news story (sorry don't recall the link) that there's some potential to write core parts of your application in C but it's strongly discouraged. And that doesn't help you much anyhow.

(This reply written on a modified G1 btw... qwerty keyboards rock!)

Answer 2

Can I ask why you don't like Java? Certainly it's not because of the syntax. I am also a C# developer that has created and released an application for Android. It took me about 2 weeks from the time I installed Eclipse and the Android SDK until I released the app(MotoTorch LED).

But as Sam stated, Java is currently the only way to make native Android applications. You could go with web apps though.

Though the Mono project has been working on allowing .Net code to be "converted" to code that's compatible with Android, though I don't know if they have cancelled it or not.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Feb-16.html

EDITED: while there doesn't seem to be an "official" MONO project release for .Net -> Android, Koushik has ported the Mono project to work with C# --> Android. When I posted the link above, I actually didn't click through to Koushik Dutta's blog, so I didn't know he had made such progress. I actually just downloaded it and going to see if I can get it to work.

http://www.koushikdutta.com/2009/12/building-mono-using-android-ndk.html