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.

Post from: EveryJoe

.NET Development for iPhone, At Last

Poderosa is the best terminal emulator for Cygwin that I have come across. It has a tabbed GUI, much like the PuTTY Connection Manager. However, in addition to the network communication protocols through which one can connect to a remote system using PuTTY, local Cygwin shells can also be opened using Poderosa. I use it mainly for the latter purpose.

Poderosa allows the user to set custom fonts and colors, keyboard shortcuts, command suggestions, etc. The “detailed preference editor” is especially useful, though not very straightforward to use. The app was built in a plug-in architecture and allows one to build custom plug-ins.

Poderosa too needs .NET Framework 2.0 preinstalled on your computer. Unlike PuTTY Connection Manager, I found Poderosa very stable. For telnet though, Poderosa gave me trouble where the PuTTY Connection Manager worked.

Poderosa, according to the website, had funding from the Japanese Govt. during 2005. Presently, its development seems to have stopped over a couple of years ago. The last release was v4.1.0 and you can get it from here.

Image Source: Poderosa on my PC.

Post from: EveryJoe

Poderosa: The Terminal Emulator

I recently discovered that there is a tabbed version of PuTTY called the PuTTY Connection Manager allowing multiple PuTTY instances in a single window.

PuTTY Connection Manager has several other features like workspace customizations, auto-login and post-login commands, Import/Export connection info to XML, and localization in French. Though the installation installs a help document, it runs as a standalone application and is easily portable.

The app crashed on a few instances while I was using it, and it takes a few seconds to start, but I find it very useful. Also, considering that it is still in version 0.7 alpha and is actively being updated, I have every hope that it will become more stable in the coming future.

The app was developed using C# and it needs Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. Unlike PuTTY this is not open source but a freeware.

Image Source: Putty Connection Manager website.

Post from: EveryJoe

PuTTY Connection Manager for Tabbed PuTTY