trentacular

I was recently presented with an opportunity to write a mobile application for a local Dallas homeless ministry. Learning about what the ministry leader envisioned for the app as well as already owning a Mac and an iPhone led me down the iOS development path. After reading a little about Objective-C and memory management, I quickly was loosing hope for turning something around before having to go back to work Monday. I guess I’ve been spoiled for too long with automatic garbage collection.

I then learned about MonoTouch, downloaded the trial, got up and running with MonoDevelop, and one evening later had finished my first application. To get my feet wet, I chose to port a Windows Phone 7 application my colleagues at Slalom and I had written called Texas Roadside History (shameless plug: if you use a WP7, search for Roadside History in the Marketplace).

I want to highlight a single HUGE benefit I’ve realized to having used MonoTouch: I get the WCF stack!

The server component of Texas Roadside History is running in Azure – SQL Azure and a Web role providing both a SOAP Web service endpoint and OData endpoints. Having already generated service references (client proxies) for these endpoints in the WP7 version of the app, I simply copied them into my MonoTouch project, referenced the System.ServiceModel assembly, and was back to making asynchronous Web service calls with zero XML parsing.