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iPhone Gets .Net App Development

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the next-comes-drag-and-drop-development dept.

snydeq writes "Novell has announced MonoTouch 1.0, a commercial SDK that allows developers to build iPhone apps using Microsoft's .Net Framework instead of the Apple-designated C or Objective-C languages. The SDK leverages Novell's Mono runtime for running Windows apps on non-Windows systems, allowing developers to utilize code and libraries written for .Net and programming languages like C#. With MonoTouch, the Mono runtime provides such developer services as garbage collection, thread management, type safety, and Web services, said Mono leader Miguel de Icaza."

4 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Launch Times? by Gwala · · Score: 5, Informative

    Probably not too bad - my guess would be it's using the AOT version of Mono, which compiles the framework into the final application, resulting in much better load times in performance-critical environments (see http://www.mono-project.com/AOT )

    --
    #!/bin/csh cat $0
  2. Re:Launch Times? by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, there are two large things standing in the way of that:

    1. The best .NET development tool, from what I can tell, is still going to be some form of Visual Studio.
    2. Unlike Java, .NET makes native bindings dirt simple. If you were using a DLL in C++, you can use the same DLL in C# relatively easily.

    #1 means that even if people want to target Mono, they might develop in VS.NET anyway, which is a bunch of VS.NET and Windows sales for Microsoft. #2 means that anyone who doesn't deliberately target Mono is probably going to call a bunch of native win32 code, just because it's so trivially easy to do so.

    Note that both of these exist even with a "100% compatible" Mono, unless it was also combined with a 100% compatible Wine, and we all know exactly how likely the latter is.

    --
    Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  3. Re:Launch Times? by Cyberax · · Score: 5, Informative

    Java has quite nice bindings to C++ now in form of JNA ( https://jna.dev.java.net/ ), it's actually about as powerful as .NET interop.

    Of course, managed C++ is even better still.

  4. Re:Must be app-store approved... by Plug · · Score: 5, Informative
    1. It's not a "shell" or a "runtime", it is ahead-of-time compiled down to native code.
    2. This is a wrapper around native Apple UI objects, it's not using any Windows or .NET UI objects. You use the Apple Interface Builder just like you would if you were using Objective C.