Professional iPhone® Programming with MonoTouch and .NET/C#

Chapter 2. Introduction to MonoTouch

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Getting started with MonoTouch

• Using MonoDevelop with MonoTouch

• MonoTouch and Interface Builder

• Debugging and deploying

What is MonoTouch? If you've bought this book, you probably at least have some basic idea, but this chapter is all about giving you the essential answers to this question so that you have a firm foundation from which to try your hand at and apply your development skills to iPhone application development.

Simply put, MonoTouch is a set of tools that allows developers to build iPhone and iPod Touch applications on a Mac using existing knowledge of the .NET Framework. The MonoTouch application programming interface (API) provides a combination of the core .NET 3.5 Framework features and the core APIs that are provided by the iPhone SDK. To allow this to happen, the .NET Framework is compiled down into ARM code so that it will run on the iPhone device, whereas the iPhone native APIs, those written in Objective-C and C, are exposed via an interop between C# and the native APIs themselves. This allows developers to code against these foreign APIs in a familiar fashion and in a way that they are comfortable with from their knowledge of C#.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN DEVELOPING

I'm going to make an assumption right from the get go and that assumption is that you have an Intel Mac. The reason behind this is that the Apple iPhone SDK only supports these types of machines for development. Because MonoTouch uses the iPhone SDK, you'll ...