Simon says, Hello MonoTouch

MonoTouch Hello World Screencast

As my first real blog post, I am going to start with something exciting and very new, so lets get started!

Earlier this week I got the priviledge to join the closed preview of the MonoTouch SDK coming from the guys in the Mono project at Novell.

For people unfamiliar with Mono, it is an open source .NET framework implementation which runs on many platforms and also includes many great libraries such as GTK# and the MonoDevelop IDE. Mono also includes Moonlight the Silverlight port which they maintain for Linux and other platforms.

MonoTouch is another great library from these guys which is really coming at a great time for a hot industry which is mobility. MonoTouch is CocoaTouch bindings for .NET.

What does this mean? This means you can use .NET and C# code on the iPhone. Hold on, I know, you need a moment to soak that in. I’ll wait………..

Yes, C# on the iPhone. They have wrapped many of the Objective-C libraries via bindings. This is common practice, they are good at this sort of stuff with libraries like GTK#. The only slight difference is because the iPhone can’t run a CLR and IL bytecode, it must be statically compiled to native ARM. They call this AOT (Ahead of Time) compilation.

The code re-use possibilities for larger companies with a framework like MonoTouch is huge. Also many developers will be able to leverage their already learned skills, and have to learn a bit of MonoTouch API’s.

Unfortunately you still need a Mac to sign/run the applications.

I have created a screencast to showcase what a Hello World MonoTouch application looks like, and how quickly we can get it going on the Simulator (on the device is just as easy, only 1 more step required).

Enjoy the screencast, send me any comments or feedback. Let me know what you might like to see in screencast #2.

You can reach me on Twitter please ReTweet this blog and spread the word of MonoTouch!