Getting started: buy your IDE

As a first article on this blog, I will talk about how you can start developing for the iPhone using nothing but .NET.

As we all know and just can't deny, the iPhone is one hell of a smart phone. I myself am now owning my second iPhone, since the first one took a plunge into the swimming pool together with me. Although it was funny the first few minutes, a little bit later I realized that the good smartphone days were over. For a few weeks I used my old smart phone (no details here) before running to the store and almost bagging him to sell me a new iPhone... . (Yes, the other smartphone was that bad and for some reason I found that it wasn't that 'smart' at all ... )
Anyway, back to business. I'm having interests in developing for the iPhone for some time now and therefore I started to investigate how to do this. You basically have two choices:

1. You use Apple's IDE called XCode. This is a very good IDE but also requires you to program in objective C if you want to do iPhone development. 'Problem' is I didn't had the time to learn this language and, more important to me, in my opinion objective see is not easy to read and use.

2. You use Novell's MonoTouch. MonoTouch is a commercial product based on mono which allows .NET development for all kinds of none Microsoft platforms. You can download a trail version here. Read the instructions on this page carefully because you will also need to download and install the Apple iPhone SDK, Mono for OS X and MonoDevelop for OS X. And as you have probably figured out right now, you will also need a Mac. I'm currently working on my Macbook Air, which is a very (VERY) nice notebook.

So if you want to develop for the iPhone using .NET, option 2 is the way to go. As far as I know, at this moment only OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard are supported. For the iPhone itself, OS 3.0 and 3.1 (or higher) are supported.
The MonoTouch trail version will only let you run your applications on the iPhone Simulator and you cannot debug. This last obstacle was the main reason for me to buy the full version which cost me around 400 euro.

The MonoTouch IDE is a slim version of Microsoft's Visual Studio so if you are familiar with this tool, MonoTouch will not seem very different to you.