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

INTRODUCTION

THE IPHONE IS THE MOST EXCITING SMARTPHONE currently in the mobile device marketplace. In the space of 3 years, it has gone from an installed base of zero to an installed base of 80 million devices. Accompanying that growth is a growth in the interest in writing applications that run natively on the device. When Apple originally shipped the iPhone, it had no capabilities to allow custom written applications on the device. Apple listened to the developer marketplace and added the ability to run native applications on the device. Initially, these applications were written in Objective-C. Over time, additional frameworks have been created to allow developers not fluent in Objective-C to target the iPhone.

Since the release of the .NET Framework in January 2002, its growth has been impressive. Currently, the .NET Framework is the most popular development framework in use today. Due to the popularity of the .NET Framework, Ximian, later purchased by Novell, announced the Mono Project. The Mono Project has built an implementation of the .NET Framework that runs on several non-Windows platforms. In the summer of 2009, Novell announced MonoTouch. MonoTouch allows .NET developers, primarily those writing C# applications, to create applications that run natively on the iPhone.

To .NET developers, the ability to write applications that natively run on the iPhone is an amazing and exciting thing as it opens the iPhone to them and their skills. .NET developers are not required to ...