Monotouch and Lion

I have been like many developers following the progress of mono. Mono is the open source implementation of Microsoft’s proprietary .NET Framework.  There has been a lot of buzz on a recent development name Monotouch. Monotouch gives  you the developer the ability to program in C# for the iOS platform.

The iOS platform consists of 3 products currently – iPhone, iPOD Touch and the iPAD. All 3 products have been commercially great successes. So I decided to develop on this platform. I have been a c# developer since the beta of the .NET Framework. I still somewhere have the cds Microsoft sent out.

So once I made up my mind – I bought the latest Mac Mini. The system was the 599 USD version with Lion and Xcode 4.  I then followed the directions setting up my machine.  In hind sight I wish I did  the set up slightly different.  The current version of  Monotouch does not , I repeat, does not work well with Xcode 4. But if you are like me you would want xcode 4 as well.  In fact I got a number of errors. Partial list of examples below.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6785520/is-it-safe-to-upgrade-to-os-x-lion-for-monotouch-developers

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4466740/error-merging-info-plist-in-monodevelop-monotouch

The solution was to roughly- ( see below for the exact steps)

1. Install Xcode 3.2.6 to /Applications/Developer.
2. Copy the developer folder to Developer3.
3. install Xcode 4 to /Applications/Developer.

So what I did ultimately and it seems to work

1. Install Mono
2. Install MonoDevelop
3. Install Xcode 4
4. Install Monotouch
5. Copy Developer Folder  (containing Xcode 4) to Developer4
6. Install XCode 3.2.6     (please follow these directions from daniele! So Click that link!)
7. Install Monotouch (yet again)
8. Copy Developer Folder  (containing Xcode 3) to Developer3
9. Copy Developer4 Folder  (containing Xcode4) to Developer
10. Now In order to use IB (interface Builder) I used the excellent advice from Geoff Norton

  I am compiling and runing iPhone Monotouch apps in the simulator on Lion with the current version of Monotouch.

So I can work in Xcode 4 and because I chose the right options while install xcode 3 make app for earlier version of MAC OS X and universal binaries as well.