What is MonoTouch?

MonoTouch is a commercial edition of Mono(developed by Novell) that runs on Apple's IPhone and IPod Touch devices. With it you can develop IPhone and IPod Touch applications using C# and the .NET framework (well a cut down version that targets Moonlight which is Novell's implementation of Silverlight 2).

  1. What do I need to get started?
    You will need a Mac and the IPhone SDK. If you wish to deploy your application to your device (IPhone or IPod Touch) then you will need to be an Apple IPhone Developer (Apple charge a $99 yearly fee).
  2. What IDE should I use?
    MonoDevelop is an IDE that has builtin support for MonoTouch. While developing your IPhone/IPod Touch application you can also make use of Interface Builder and XCode (these are IDEs included with the Apple IPhone SDK).
  3. Has MonoTouch been released yet?
    Yes. MonoTouch is no longer in private beta and has been released see http://monotouch.net.
  4. Is MonoTouch free?
    MonoTouch has a free evaluation version that lets you build and test applications using the iPhone simulator. If you wish to build and deploy an application to the app store, or to your own phone then you will need to buy the commercial version of the product.There is a professional version for $399 and the license for this version is assigned to a individual. You can deploy to your phone or to the App Store. There is also an enterprise edition that costs $999 for a developer license (the license is assigned to a company and not a specific individual). Applications built using this version can be deployed to your phone, the Apple App Store or to phones within the enterprise. There is a $3,999 version of the enterprise edition that gives you 5 licenses for the price of 4.