Question

I know about Monotouch and I have virtual MacOS and Monodevelop/Monotouch installed.

However, is it better to build an iPhone application in Monotouch on Mac OS X or it’s as easy as to build iPhone app in Visual Studio and port it to iPhone via Monotouch?

Is there anyone who tried porting c# project to iPhone? How different was it from building the app on mac os using monodevelop/monotouch?

ps. my favourite helper utilities does not exist on mac os and that’s the reason for this Q

Answer 1

You simply can’t develop a MonoTouch application just using Visual Studio. You have to use the OSX tools to build the code and create the package for the phone. There’s no way to work around that, and the easiest way to do it is using MonoDevelop.

What me and other developers have done in the past is to develop some of the C# libraries for the apps using Visual Studio, because even though MonoDevelop is pretty good, its still far from being as good as VS. Refactoring code, for example, is much easier with tools like Resharper, etc.

When developing the App in Visual Studio, there’s a lot of things you’ll have to deal with; for example:

• You simply cannot run a build from Visual Studio: VS doesn’t know how to build the kind of project necessary for the iPhone, and it doesn’t have all the libraries that exist in the iOS SDK.
• there’s no visual editor to create the XIB files you you probably want to create for your app.
• You’ll have to do a lot of extra work here and there to get the VS to even open the solution (like copy lib files from OSX to Windows, create separate projects, etc) (although I think Novell Mono tools for VS may help a little on this one.

So here’s what I’ve been doing for the last 6 months:

• Break down the application into different projects for business logic and UI logic
• You should be able to build, compile and even test the business logic from VS. Just remember not to use any UI libraries, or external libraries not available in MonoTouch
• Use MonoDevelop to build the UI code part of the app. Being able to quickly run the app to test helps a lot.
• Every once in a while, if you feel you need to to a big cleanup, open the code in Visual Studio, and do the refactorings; although you won’t be able to build anything, the code checker in VS will help to make sure the code is still valid.

Hope it helps!