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.
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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.
