One of the big new features of Windows Phone 7.5 (code named Mango) is direct camera access. Having access to the camera stream enables several new scenarios, such as in-app QR and barcode scanning, augmented reality applications or custom looking photo camera UI. There are some good resources on how to use the new APIs to access the camera in Mango, but I haven’t found any complete examples of how to implement a QR code scanner, which is what I am going to do in this blog post.

Earlier this summer I gave a presentation at NDC 2011 about writing cross platform mobile applications using C# and .NET. At the time of the presentation the future of MonoTouch and Mono for Android was uncertain, but with the recent news of Xamarin gaining ownership of the products, the future of C# on iOS and Android looks brighter than ever.

The following blog post is an article originally published in the most current issue of "The Developer", a magazine distributed to Norwegian developers. The article discusses the exciting possibility to use C# and .NET across the three major smart phone platforms WP7, iOS and Android. Since the magazine is only distributed in Norway I decided to post it on my blog as well. You can either read it here, or download a PDF version of the article as presented in the magazine.