It costs $400 for a license, though. But boy I am tempted... I know, I know- you need to go with the native languages for the best experience. But keeping a huge chunk of my codebase between platforms is a very, very interesting idea to me.
you need to go with the native languages for the best experience.
With MonoTouch, you still write against the native iOS UI. Therefore, from the user's perspective, your app is native.
Since the UI is the same, the only thing that could be different between an ObjC and MonoTouch app is performance. In my experience there's no noticeable performance hit with MonoTouch except for app startup time (my MonoTouch app takes about 2 seconds to startup on a 3gs)
MonoTouch does give you a native experience. It's basically a C# binding for native APIs. It also has a few nice extras like MonoTouch.Dialog which provides a much nicer API for doing iPhone dialogs than using UITableView (although you can definitely use the UITableView API directly if you prefer).
Kind of surprised we haven't seen JetBrains step up with a Mono IDE yet. They've already got the IDEA platform and ReSharper, combining the two seems a logical next step.
Interesting! Going from VS 2005 to 2008 to 2010, Resharper has gone from must-have to nice to not needed anymore for me, since most of the features I relied on have been implemented natively in VS.
I would bet they are bumping up against a developer bandwidth issue. Don't forget, they have about 6 commercial products, plus their own language now (and IDE, natch).
The good news is that the community edition of IJ is Open Source (Apache licensed, IIRC) and there are quite a few existing language editors built on top of it. It isn't a rich client platform à la Eclipse or NetBeans, but I doubt such a thing would be required to win the affections of those who are unhappy using MonoDevelop.
It would be an interesting idea to them if they have an Android phone and I wouldn't have the time to code for two platforms otherwise.
I get that there is a tradeoff involved, but the Mono-x products are in an interesting space. They aren't webviews (like PhoneGap), they aren't a weird JS hybrid (like Titanium)- they're full native experiences. You'll get some newly released features later (I imagine), but the user experience really shouldn't be affected that much.
http://xamarin.com/
It costs $400 for a license, though. But boy I am tempted... I know, I know- you need to go with the native languages for the best experience. But keeping a huge chunk of my codebase between platforms is a very, very interesting idea to me.