What is the state of non-Objective-C programming for iPhone?

Question

After spending three weeks learning Objective-C and Cocoa programming for my work, I\'ve been tasked with researching alternatives to it for iPhone development.

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Answer 1

Here's my answer as someone who bought MonoTouch and am using it as the basis for all of my iPhone apps.

There are no shortcuts. You need to know Objective-C and CocoaTouch before you even consider something else. You can't grab MonoTouch and start coding for the phone without any knowledge of the native stuff, it just isn't going to happen.

MonoTouch is easy enough to extend/alter as needed, if you already know CocoaTouch and ObjC well enough. So the idea that the native frameworks could change leaving you in the dust isn't that relevant.

I have found in my experience that MonoTouch apps are slower than their native counterparts, but not enough to matter. If it does matter, you can always write that part of the app with native code, and it's possible ObjC wouldn't be fast enough anyway and you'd want to drop to pure C even in a native app.

MonoTouch has netted me some serious productivity gains, from being able to use a far less terse and chatty language to being able to use libraries like Rhino Mocks and NUnit out of the box.

MonoDevelop is a great IDE in theory. It's also far superior to xcode, in theory. It's lightweight, simple, very easy to use, excellent intellisense and macros, and makes managing an iPhone project far easier than xcode. But ... it's really buggy. That is it's true downfall right now.