C# on the IPhone

28 June, 2009 (06:06) | .NET Tools | By: twagner

This morning I stumbled across some discussion of using C# to build IPhone apps. You may know already that ordinarily IPhone apps are built using Apple’s Objective-C , which is pretty ancient and lacks some useful features like automatic memory management for example. Objective C came out as part of NextStep which was a company that Steve Jobs had for a little while during the years when John Scully was at the helm of Apple. This was back in the late 80’s early 90’s I think.  So basically the code used to write IPhone apps is about 15 -20 years old and at this point its only a version 2 product. Seems odd. From what I have read, dealing with Objective-C is no picnic. Imagine my surprise when I saw this note on the Mono site.I followed the links and found Unity - what looks to be a very capable game design IDE that uses C# and compiles to Apple Objective-C. Thats pretty neat. I suspect it probably has some early version hiccups but in time with proper care and  feeding I wonder if this IDE wouldnt grow into something usable for general IPhone dev.