So it seems Android isn't quite as bulletproof as I had hoped. Applications for Android are broken down into 'Activities', you can think of these as maybe 'screens' or 'modules'. Each Activity is distinctly separate, and applications aren't really just containers for Activities - each Activity can be an app in it's own right. This provides some serious power to the platform, since any application can make use of public Activities, you can literally include things like the native Google maps directly into your app.
The only problem is that they don't seem to be totally reliable. I've got a consistent issue where the OS opens an activity, closes it, then opens it again. It took hours and hours to track this issue down since it's both completely unexpected, and the ramifications were just 'odd behaviour'. This is one case where the Visual Studio debugger would have made this issue blatantly obvious almost immediately. It's unfortunate that the Android debug tools are a little anaemic and incredibly unreliable.
On a related note, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to complete this project I've embarked on. While Android is great, the different screen sizes, poor debugging tools (this is a big one), and general fracturing of the ecosystem means making games is a very tricky proposition. I should clarify this - making games for Android is relatively straightforward. Making multiplayer games for Android, is decidedly not.
I think I may transition my code to WP7 Mango. The extra functionality of C# mixed with the excellent dev tools should dramatically reduce my development time. Or alternatively, I could just drop the multiplayer functionality.
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