recent corporate changes that have impacted the Mono product line. For some
while Novell have owned Mono, having previously absorbed the original
developer, Miguel de Icaza, and his company, Ximian. Recently, Attachmate
completed their acquisition of Novell and there have been the usual
consequential streamlining processes occurring.
One of the casualties of this process is the Mono team, who were all
released. This means that formal development of the commercial tools
MonoTouch for iPhone development and Mono for Android for Android
development have now halted. There's been little noise on this subject from
Attachmate, but the current thinking is that people who've already bought
these products are still entitled to support. How supportive this support
turns out to be is, perhaps, questionable. Certainly the store mechanisms
that allow purchasing of MonoTouch and Mono for Android licenses have been
disabled.
I should just add at this point that these events should not affect Mono
itself, which is and always has been an open source platform. It's the
commercial tools for iOS and Android that are primarily affected.
For those who have been taking advantage of the homely feel of .NET
development for iOS and Android devices, this news has set the cat among the
pigeons, or thrown a spanner in the works, or whatever your preferred cliche
may be. However, all is not lost.
As soon as Miguel and his team were let go, they immediately set up Xamarin.
Xamarin is already working on producing API-compatible tools, similar to
MonoTouch and Mono for Android, currently named .NET for iOS and .NET for
Android respectively. The projected time for these tools is 3-4 months with
the iOS product coming first.
Clearly this 4 month gap may prove logistically troublesome for some, but if
you have already bought one of the Novell tools you can carry on working
with it with an eye to switching to the Xamarin equivalent towards the
Autumn.
If this time window is too much, well, you can always spend some time
picking up native Objective-C skills or learning Java and use the normal
development process in Xcode or AppCode for iOS, or Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA
for Android.
It seems that interest in the Mono-based tools continues. Various scheduled
conference talks around the world on the topics are still going ahead rather
than being cancelled. Personally, I will still be talking on Mono for
Android at a Dutch User group (SDN) event in June.
That said, the timing of this unsettling news is not great for me as I'd
started work on a series of tutorials for Mono for Android. I'll probably
put them on hold until the Xamarin products show some life, but since I'd
finished the first one, I've put it on my web site. It's looks at how you
get going with Mono for Android and looks at the way Android applications
operate, to get you started in the Android world, from a Mono for Android
perspective.
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