What do we do now? "It's over man, Wormer dropped the big one" - #MonoTouch and #MonoDroid
As you likely know, Mono, Monotouch, and Mono for Android are in limbo right now.
This scene has been in the back of my mind since last Friday night when I got the call that I didn't want to hear, but I knew that it would come. Anyway, the question now becomes what do you do? I don't have the answers for everyone, but I have my original decision matrix that I'll repeat here with some discussion mixed in.
- Go the "vendor
directed" native route. This means having to (re)learn Objective-C for
the iPhone and Java for Android along with XCode and Eclipse. I have
problems moving between VB and C#, how am I going to keep these two
different platforms straight in my mind? Thankfully, learning Monotouch
and Mono for Android and the fact that its a thin layer over the top of
the native APIs means that its just not that hard to move. This has
the least amount of risk, but the most amount of learning.
- Stay
the course and wait for Attachmate to improve the products. Ok, this
is an option, but I doubt it is a very good option. Attachmate doesn't seem
to care about their customers in this situation. They have had two
plus weeks to formulate a strategy to communicate with them and there
has been no communication. Can they enhance and support the products? I
don't know, but I don't think that they have the ability to do this. What about "All technology roadmaps remain intact"?
- Stay
the short course and wait on Xamarin. This would involve working with
Monotouch until Xamarin can produce a product that will allow for C# to
work with the iPhone. What about Mono for Android? I've worked with it
for a while, and it just isn't ready for prime time yet. If the
debugger had been fixed and performance had been resolved, I would feel
different. I just can't recommend Mono for Android as it exists right
now. What about the legal issues? I just don't know.
