Native libraries in MonoDroid library projects

Currently, MonoDroid (Mono for Android) doesn’t support native libraries (or any other Android resource type) in library projects (bug report). Fortunately, they support normal .NET assembly resources. This led me to write a workaround for this missing feature.

The Class

Here’s the class that implements to loader.

MonoDroidLibraryLoader.cs

History:

• 2012-07-18: Updates documentation and added some logging

• 2012-07-11: Initial revision

How to use

To use this class, you first need to create a directory structure for the native libraries, like this:

Project
+- NativeLibs
   +- armeabi-v7a
   +- armeabi
   +- other ABIs you want to support

Now place the native libraries in the apropriate directories, for example:

Project
+- NativeLibs
   +- armeabi-v7a
   |  +- libsqlite.so
   +- armeabi
      +- libsqlite.so

Then select “Embedded Resource” as Build Action in the file’s properties (Hotkey: F4).

Now use one of the Load() methods to load the library. For example, if you have a type called MyType in the project’s default namespace (specified in the project settings), you can use this call to load a library called libsqlite.so:

MonoDroidLibraryLoader.Load("sqlite", typeof(MyType));

Note: If you renamed the directory “NativeLibs” from above, you can specify it as third parameter for Load().

CodeProject