I have been working as an independent software developer for some months and recently got some free time after finishing a project I was working on so I decided to install the iPhone SDK back again in my Mac.
After installing the SDK I started to read books and documentation about developing for the iPhone but one thing was really bugging me and it was Objective-C. It is not a bad language and it is not that difficult after you keep using it for a while but in my case I wanted to focus on learning all the concepts instead of learning a new language so after reading some tweets and blog posts by @migueldeicaza about developing with Mono and C# I decided to give it a try.
I decided to give MonoTouch a chance so I went to http://monotouch.net/ and read all the documentation. I also got Mono, MonoDevelop and MonoTouch SDK installed as all of them are requirements.
After I installed everything I created a new iPhone project in MonoDevelop and tried to compile but I couldn’t. The problem was that I only installed the iPhone SDK 3.1.3 but MonoTouch requires 3.1 so I had to ran the installation again and select the missing versions. Once I installed the missing versions of the SDK I was ready to go and everything compiled as expected.
Working with C# and .NET APIs is awesome as you can do the same as you can with Objective-C but with less lines of code and faster.
The experience is great and don’t get me wrong Objective-C is a great language but as I said before I am more interested in understanding all the concepts than anything else.
The only drawback with MonoTouch is that it isn’t free, there is a free version but you can’t deploy your app to the simulator or generate an App Store ready binary. The “cheapest” version is US$399 for 1 year of updates and 1 developer. If you are serious about developing for the platform and have a .NET background or even code that you want to reuse then it is a no brainer as you can easily get them back if your app is good.
I will definitely keep playing with it for a while but I will also get back to Objective-C.
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