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.
What’s your thought on the mono developers losing their jobs? How would this change your future use of MonoTouch?
http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2011/05/attachmate-lays-off-mono-emplo.html
Craig Dunn has a good post below that talks about the potential future for MonoTouch. I actually think it now has more potential than ever, just might have a new name.
http://conceptdev.blogspot.com/2011/05/monotouchmonodroid-and-xamarin-what-now.html