Mono for iOS/Android Open or Closed? Paid or Free?

Question

I am attempting to learn more about mobile/tablet development and, as a .NET developer, I am naturally drawn to Mono. But I am confused--I thought that Mono was free and op

Answer 1

As a long-time .Net developer (starting with 1.0), I can tell you that if you are anything other than a hobbyist, any money you spend on MonoTouch and MonoDroid will pay huge dividends in the very short term.

There is a certainly a learning curve for the UI and the third-party control environment isn't anywhere near as robust as it is for the Windows platforms, but the ability to program against the .Net framework (even if the language is C#) is an indescribable advantage and well worth every penny spent with Xamarin.

We were able to port a 500,000 line VB.Net application written for the Tablet OS and PocketPC to the iPad in less than 3 months, including local database support, web services interaction, etc. And it should take us less than another month to create the UI for Android now that we have a common services layer. At that point, we will have an application that will have similar functionality across iOS, Android, Windows desktop, Windows tablet, and Windows Phone. I certainly can't do that with the tens of thousands of dollars that I spend per year in the Microsoft ecosystem.