Windows & .NET Watch: A touch of Mono

By Larry O'Brien

November 1, 2009 —

If you track Microsoft technologies, you are probably aware of the Mono Project, an open-source implementation of the .NET development stack that runs on Linux and Mac as well as on Windows. The project is led by Miguel de Icaza and is sponsored by Novell.

Although for years I’ve felt that Linux servers hosting ASP.NET applications via Mono seemed like a sweet combination, many clients have been hesitant, presumably feeling that the possible savings in OS license fees were not worth the risks. Mono seems to have had its greatest successes within the Linux community as an alternative to C/C++. C# is easier to develop in than these compiled languages, and Mono has relatively high performance—probably slower than native code, but likely faster than a dynamic language such as Perl, Python or Ruby.

Some have resisted the Mono project, though, since C# and the CLR, while standardized by ECMA, are driven by Microsoft. For some, the mere proximity to Redmond is enough to stay away. Others have feared subterfuge from Microsoft, and still others have felt that Mono is necessarily “chasing tail-lights” and therefore doomed to be significantly behind in terms of technology.

Fears of sabotage aside, Mono is tailgating aggressively. Currently, one can program in C# 3.0 (including LINQ), VB 8, F#, Java and other JVM-based languages via IKVM, Delphi Prism, and even IronPython and IronRuby. Libraries include ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX, and Windows Forms 2.0. There’s also Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Silverlight. The MonoDevelop IDE, while not ready to go head-to-head with decent commercial IDEs, has code completion, visual project management, and decent code navigation.

In September of 2009, Novell released MonoTouch, a tool chain that supports the iPhone. You may have heard of the iPhone, a device that’s found some measure of success. Apple claims 85,000 apps have been developed for the iPhone, at least several of which are not fart apps. Until MonoTouch, developing for the iPhone essentially meant using Objective C, in large part because the iPhone developer agreement forbids embedding interpreters. But MonoTouch is neither an interpreter nor a JIT compiler: It’s a native code compiler. Runtime support DLLs are copied into the application’s resource bundle so there is no burden on the end user (the size of even a “Hello, World” app is around 7MB).

MonoTouch has two especially powerful features (three if you count its garbage collector, which might be reason enough to use it). Mono works with Interface Builder, Apple’s UI development tool. This is important because Interface Builder is both powerful, with roots going back to the NeXT development environment, and ubiquitous in Apple development tutorials and documentation. MonoTouch allows Interface Builder to be used in a manner that will be more familiar to .NET developers (declare outlets and attach a handler function to a particular event in code), or in Apple’s standard way (define actions within Interface Builder).

The other very powerful feature is that MonoTouch allows you to develop against either the most common namespaces in the .NET Base Class Library or against Apple’s iPhone SDK. So, for instance, you can retrieve a Web page using either the BCL’s familiar HttpWebRequest or with Cocoa Touch’s NSURLRequest. This allows for great productivity in cases where your fingers “know” the .NET APIs, but also allows for access to the very large majority of Cocoa Touch APIs. (Want to know your latitude and longitude? It’s as easy as CLLocationManager.StartUpdatingLocation() .) The Objective C Smalltalk-style function signatures are converted into C# names following standard naming conventions.

Again, while it’s technically true that Mono is following along behind Apple’s SDK releases, Mono’s 3.1 SDK support was released by late September, within three weeks of the SDK release.

There are some shortcomings with MonoTouch. Debugging is essentially non-existent (a failure that seems significant in a development product that costs several hundred dollars for a single license), and blunders relating to Interface Builder or uploading to a physical device can lead to cryptic error messages.

The iPhone is certainly the “It” phone, but is still third in market share, trailing Research In Motion (barely) and Nokia (by a long shot). Nonetheless, iPhone development is becoming a hot commodity on job boards and, certainly, the iPhone App Store is miles ahead of the competition for those developing retail mobile software. MonoTouch is the best entry point for C# developers interested in seeing what all the hubbub is about.

Larry O'Brien is a technology consultant, analyst and writer. Read his blog at www.knowing.net.

Related Search Term(s): Apple, Mono, .NET

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Comments

11/01/2009 04:13:28 PM EST

Debuggig will be available to MonoTouch users with out 1.2 release this comic week. Anyone can download the current preview as well that contains the visual debugger; It is pretty much the same debugging experienceybat developers get with visual studio. There is one added bonus: developers can debug over wifi and even distribute apps to beta testers that can be debugged remotely over the Internet

United StatesMiguel de Icaza

11/01/2009 05:17:38 PM EST

"Some have resisted the Mono project, though, since C# and the CLR, while standardized by ECMA, are driven by Microsoft." This statement is rather incorrect. Only a small fraction of C# and CLR is standartized under ECMA. And only 2.6% of all the classes in .NET are standardized under ECMA.

United Stateswashere

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