1.4. Introduction to Development on the Mac with MonoDevelop

You'll start by building an application with MonoDevelop, running it in the iPhone simulator, and finally deploying that application to an iPhone. MonoDevelop is the software development tool for Mono on the Mac. MonoDevelop is available for Windows, Mac, and several flavors of Linux; however, we will concentrate on MonoDevelop for the Mac. MonoDevelop for the Mac is a new product. It is officially released with MonoDevelop 2.2. MonoDevelop is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for developing with Mono/.NET, C#, and other languages. MonoDevelop can be used to create iPhone applications, desktop applications, and web applications with WebForms and MVC.

The first thing that a developer will do is to start up MonoDevelop (Figure 1). Given that this is most likely the first time a developer has gone through this, this section explains it in excruciating detail. Hopefully, this will help with any questions that may arise. Once MonoDevelop is running, create an iPhone application. This can be done by selecting File New Solution and selecting an iPhone application to create, as shown in Figure 2.