.NET Development for iPhone, At Last

I have never been a fan of Apple, never bought an iPod, MAC, or anything on their product line. I am a hardcore Microsoft technologist and I have earned my keep through my Microsoft skills and as such my loyalty to the software giant.

But I had a different perspective when I first held an iPhone in my hand, deep inside I wanted to have one but didn’t go ahead and get myself an iPhone because after much research, I could not use .NET to program in iPhone.

The gate seemed to open when Novell announced on Monday about a kit for developers that would allow them to build Apple iPhone and Apple iPod touch applications using Microsoft .NET skills. The current programming language of iPhone is C or Objective-C language.

Novell has a technology called MonoTouch 1.0 which is a commercial software development kit which allow developers to utilize codes and libraries written for .Net and programming languages such as C#.

Miguel de Icaza who is the vice president of the developer platform at Novell says that both C# and .Net are more productive development environments than the native language of iPhone, Objective-C.

Novell expect that applications that would be developed using their platform would range from productivity applications to LOB, health care, and games. Developers and software vendors would be able to sell their product line into the iPhone market.

MonoTouch is a powerful platform which include compilers, libraries, and tools which integrate with the Apple iPhone SDK. Novell’s product uses the “Ahead of time” compilation approach instead of the widely known Just In Time Compiler (otherwise known as JIT).

The MonoTouch definitely brings a huge set of developers to the iPhone phenomenon especially when .NET developers are in the 5 million population range.

Everything looks good on the MonoTouch and this would definitely convince me to buy an iPhone; there’s one problem though, the MonoTouch Enterprise Edition is priced at $ 999 USD for a one-year subscription. That is huge and given that the MonoTouch is way too late in the game since thousands of applications have already been built, 999 USD is huge. If you are a software company that is fine but if you are an individual developer, you better have the time to create a kick ass application to get an ROI for the subscription.

Image from Ultra-Case.