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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.

I am currently reading two books:

• Learn C on the Mac – I am reading this one because I have plans to start developing applications for the iPhone. I started with this because it’s been a while since I wrote C code so I have to refresh some concepts.
• Wicket in Action -  I got this one because I have been reading a lot of good things recently about this framework to develop web applications using Java and I decided to take a look. So far it looks simple but at the same time different from what I’m used to with JavaServer Faces.

In the queue I have two more books about iPhone development: Learn Objective-C on the Mac and Beginning iPhone Development.