Chris Hardy MonoTouch iApp Interview from Mix10

In March at Microsoft Mix 2010 in Vegas, I had the good luck to meet one of our authors from the Professional iPhone Programming with MonoTouch and .NET/C# team, Chris Hardy, along with Geoff Norton who works on MonoTouch for Novell. We recorded a few brief interviews that we'd planned to release almost leading up to the book release. Of course, soon after that in April Apple announced their new iPhone SDK terms and there were a lot of questions about MonoTouch relative to those terms. Wrox staff and the authors discussed the implications at length and unanimously decided to go ahead with Professional iPhone Programming with MonoTouch and .NET/C# which is now published.

We're going to post more of these videos soon, including the better discussions where Chris asks Geoff some interesting technical questions. In this first teaser video, I'm just asking Chris about the Mix10 App he wrote helped co-author Craig Dunn write in MonoTouch. This was an update of an earlier app Craig had written for PDC09 and Monospace09.

If you were convinced that the new SDK license meant the end of tools like MonoTouch for iPhone apps, here's a short list of the reasons why we went ahead with the book and MonoTouch is alive and well:

• The new terms only apply to the iOS 4 SDK. If you're still developing under the terms of the iPhone 3.x SDK and content to build 3.x apps, the new terms don't apply.
• We read on Novell blogs as well as blogs from other 3rd party application tool vendors that apps created with their tools were still being accepted in the AppStore and that the tools aren't in violation of the terms
• "monotouch APIs are basically mapped to cocoatouch" and "monotouch is a tool that produces 100% native ios apps. You can even export then build w/ xcode" quoting some recent MonoTouch explanation tweets from author Rory Blyth
• Under the iOS 4 SDK terms, the language relating to 3rd party development tools only relates to apps deployed to the app store, not enterprise application deployment. We expect that enterprise deployment is going to become a major application avenue with this release and that's perfectly suited to the millions of enterprise C# developers who might need to develop an iApp and look to MonoTouch
• Finally, if you read Steve Jobs letter about the terms, the title of the post "Thoughts on Flash," the 36 references to Flash in the letter, the zero references to any other targeted tool or application, it's clear to anyone reading this that the terms aren't about MonoTouch.

So, C# developers enjoy your new opportunity to build native iOS apps with MonoTouch and we hope you enjoy the book.