I am evaluating the technology our company will be using for Android and iOS development in the future.
As such I am looking into cross platform options as well as native development.
I understand that MonoTouch shares the same backend code, but the UI has to be duplicated.
I started my first MonoTouch project, and cannot understand how this would work. The project is in Visual Studio, and the MonoTouch for iOS has to run on mac. A VS solution wouldn’t work on mac, so I was wondering how it looks on mac and how you share the code between the two?
At the moment, there’s not an easy way of working with Mono for Android and MonoTouch when you are using Mono for Android on Visual Studio, Xamarin have two example applications (Tasky and TipCalc) that use shared code and logic but have different UIs, you can find these on their GitHub account: https://github.com/xamarin/mobile-samples
There are various ways of sharing code across the three platforms, Jonas has a great video on achieving this that you can watch here: http://jonas.follesoe.no/2011/07/22/cross-platform-mobile-ndc-2011/ and hopefully Xamarin will make this easier in the future by providing an out of the box way of opening MonoTouch projects in Visual Studio (although you’ll still need a Mac), that way you will have an easy way of coding between iOS, Android and WP7.