It was perfectly fine on my MacBook Air – no noticeable hangs, etc.

Damian

Thanks for sharing your experiences on porting to iOS. Very interesting stuff. How did you find the performance of VS within a VM on iOS?

Cheers,
Daniel

I’m not very concerned about the cons – as an iOS user I really don’t notice the app size unless it is ridiculous, and rolling your own bindings is a small price to pay.

I agree re the pros out-weighing the cons, especially for a seasoned .NET developer. In fact I’m inclined to think that even a Java developer wanting to develop for iOS could well benefit from using MonoTouch too, since the languages have a lot in common.

Of course we could invest in becoming intimately familiar with writing Objective-C, but having gone through many many language and development environment shifts in my years as a developer, it is nice to be able to re-use a familiar language and (especially) the familiar development environment combination of Visual Studio and Resharper.

I find my current setup very usable, so I probably won’t invest in Objective-C beyond being able to read it and understand it. There are too many C# patterns that I’ve grown used to, as well as the Visual Studio and Resharper development environment.

In the past I’ve been intimately familiar with Ada, C, C++, etc. but I place a high value on being able to reuse most if not all of my C# knowledge and idioms – learning the iOS frameworks is another matter – there is no escaping the effort required to grok them.

Regards,
Damian

I do like you approach where you are able to use Visual Studio. MonoDevelop is useable, but really rather basic, lacking modern refactoring tools.

Are you at all concerned by the other ‘cons’ of MonoTouch? The large application size? the need to roll your own bindings for third party controls?

I do think that pros for MonoTouch out-weigh the cons in general. Although I am seriously considering learning iOS development ‘properly’!

So, having this experience and have stepped already over the learning curve of MonoTouch & Cocoa Touch, would you choose to invest more into Apple’s own developer tools & infrastructure? Or the current setup is good enough to be productive and get the work done?

When one’s porting an app from WP7 or reusing large portions of an existing app/library, then I see how Xamarin’s products are giving benefits and a faster time-to-market cycles. But what about developing a ground new native app for iOS? Will a .NET developer be better diving a bit more and getting used with Objective-C and X-Code?

Thanks for sharing your experience!