Apple

Image via PortableHole.com


Despite the booming business of iPhone apps, many developers who favor Apple products have been limited by the lack of support for Microsoft's C# and other .NET programming languages.

MonoTouch, however, should help fill the language gap. According to this morning's Seattle PI blogs:

This, of course, is a huge development. Although naysayers are already griping about how MonoTouch only runs on Macs, there is no shortage of excited developers eager to get to work on many projects for which language barriers had been longstanding problems. In a relatively short period of time, we could see exponential growth in iPhone and iPod Touch apps as a result of MonoTouch. Even without the ability to use .NET, the App Store still has more than 76,000 applications in its arsenal. Imagine the growth possible with Microsoft's programming language now included among developers' tools.

Incredibly, it was only two months ago when Microsoft put C# documentation and .NET standards under its Community Promise. Since then, the folks at Novell were able to jump on the newfound momentum and, as we've seen, prepare MonoTouch for a September release. It also removes previous doubt that there was no way around Apple's policy banning the inclusion of mechanisms that "enable execution of arbitrary third-party code."
Best of all, no need to worry about bugs. MonoTouch supports the "iPhone simulator" which lets developers test software before it actually reaches the iPod or iPhone.

The base version of MonoTouch has been priced at $399. The enterprise version is $999 for one license (per year) and exponentially higher for multiple licenses.