Hi friends,
I've decided to start writing an iPhone app and coming from a c# background, I thought I'd start developing it with mono.
Though this question may be subjective, I'd love some guidance from you.
Is it safe to develop my app using this technology, or should I buy some books and start learning objective C?
I know Adobe were going to release a feature that allows you to build iPhone apps using Flash CS5, but this didn't last long.
I appreciate your feedback.
Marko
The iPhone dev agreement is pretty clear that C# is not an accepted technology for developing iPhone apps. Regardless, Monotouch apps have still been accepted to the app store to date without any problems. My suggestion is to keep in touch with the Monotouch forums to see what their stance is on this issue and make your decision based on that. The long term safe bet is to go learn Objective-C.
None of us except people who work very closely with the OS and the App store policy in Apple would know whether it is "safe" to develop apps using this technology. Apple can say no anytime in the future, but we don't know. What we know is that all the compiled code has to be in C, C++, or Obj-C. However there's one catch: In some cases you can run interpreted languages.
If I were you, I'd go with Objective-C. We know that Apple supports it fully, it's been in there for almost 20 years. It's not that hard to learn since you know C#. I came from C++/C and it took me about a month or so to learn half of the frameworks. There are many other frameworks which I didn't learn because they're not applicable in my apps (such as accelerators, GPS, OpenGL ES, etc). You probably can get away with this too.
Once again, there's also another way: build it with HTML5. However that way you'd have to consider what your app'll do when it's opened with Safari desktop, Firefox, IE, etc.
Recently Apple changed the clause relating to the third party development tools now stating that if you have prior approval you can use them. I haven't seen any official word that Mono will be allowed though.
If you are coming from a c# background I would highly recommend learning Obj-C because it always helps knowing another language and you could pick it up reasonably easily. Have a look at the stanford University iPhone lectures, they were the best resource when I was learning.
Although I haven't personally used C# or Mono, the iOS SDK once you get to know it has some really great work behind it making it both easy and powerful once you get used to it and I would be surprised if Mono took advantage of it all.
I think it's important to learn the language the frameworks for your platform of choice were written in. Then you can understand more why the frameworks are the way they are, and often anticipate behavior or API calls just based on knowing what is typical for the language and framework.
On top of that there is now a ton of support for blocks across the API (iOS4 and on only), which may take some time to be incorporated into MonoTouch. Overlay frameworks are always a step behind the base platform so it's nicer to be using the frameworks directly.
Monotouch is doing a great job of keeping up to date (usually within 24 hours of api updates) so just saying you have no idea about xyz but you know abc is much better than it is a bit silly. Monotouch has some serious advantages over obj c - for instance obj c has only been updated something like twice in the last twenty years!! expect good XML, regex, Http support? Think again. Linq in Obj c? never. Good OS community? Not likely. There's plenty of reasons to use MT, aside from C# being a far superior language. Being able to re-use a good percentage of your code in MonoDroid is one. Though there is word that apple are creating a new language - I'm not holding out too much hope for it. We'll see I guess.
I learned Obj C before getting into MT and the reason I went with MT is that using Obj C is like stepping back into the 90s. It just doesn't have any modern language features and is too far behind the curve. Create your bleeding edge apps with their archaic langauge? Thanks but no thanks.
It's now been months since the Flash debacle and Monotouch and Unity are still rocking along.
As developers in a .NET shop we're looking at expanding into iOS development. After prototyping some fairly basic stuff in Objective-C, We're 100% committed to using Monotouch, it's worth every penny.