What Is MonoTouch?

Before we go too far, let’s step back and take a quick look at what MonoTouch is and how it works. MonoTouch is a development kit that allows developers to use C# to build iOS applications. MonoTouch provides a set of iOS-specific bindings to Apple’s Cocoa Touch APIs that can be consumed from C#. In addition, MonoTouch also provides access to the .NET Base Class Library, including generics, garbage collection, LINQ, asynchronous programming patterns, delegates, and more.

The set of APIs exposed by the base class libraries have been fine-tuned for use in mobile scenarios. Components or features that were designed for powerful servers or desktop computing have been removed. iOS is an operating system designed for mobile devices having CPUs that have a fraction of the power of a desktop or server, and a fraction of the memory as well. This is why certain APIs, such as System.Configuration and all of its features, have been completely removed from MonoTouch.