The Biggest iPhone Development Surprise yet - C#

There are about 40 apps and games in the app store that were programmed in C#. This does not mean Windows C# but Mono, the Linux implementation of .NET. For example Downhill Bowling, which is a five star rated game.

How is this possible? Mono includes a feature called AOT (Ahead of Time) compilation. This means that all the C# intermediate code is compiled in advance, i.e. statically as opposed to the usual JIT (Just in Time). Normally when you load an assembly at run-time the IL code in the assembly is converted into native machine code as the methods are called. With AOT it's all done up front.

That said, it's not that easy. There are two ways: follow Miguel de Icaza's (He started Mono and Gnome) post on it or buy the 3rd party game engine Unity3d which supports it. As well as your Mac, IPhone development license etc, this will set you back about $700 in total (Unity Indie + Unity 2.0 upgrade + iPhone add-on). That publishes a project by generating a full Xcode project and building it but you can also run it on the iPhone in test mode. The demo video is very impressive.

• Link to C# Tutorials