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For lazing about and discussing anything in a software developer's life that takes your fancy.
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Technical discussions are welcome, but if you need specific help please
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You can do a great deal of the development within Visual Studio, but you still need a Mac with XCode to design the user interface and deploy the app to the device.
Well, that's what I had to do. I'd be willing to pay a whole lot more if I could skip that painful step!
That aside - it's amazing what Xamarin does. I felt so at home, and could become very productive in a very short space of time.
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I've found it best to do all the iPhone specific development on the MAC. MonoDevelop isn't as comprehensive as VS, but it's very useable. Xamarin have done a sound job on this and MonoTouch. The down side is OSX with all its irritating 'bouncy puppy', in-your-face skueomorphisms. I've found it best to avoid Xcode as much as possible. Xcode is probably the worst development environment I've ever come across, with a totally demented application model. Luckily you can do 99.9% of your app development without explicitly using Xcode as MonoTouch does the dirty work for you.
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PhoneGap is another option, recently aquired by Adobe... Mmmm.
Danny
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I was intensely curious to know.
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We looked into this in our office. Looking at Phonegap, Titanium, and Xamarin, they still all require a Mac OS. I know you need one to sign and submit to the store, but reading the product documentation I was under the impression that you couldn't even do the client dev without a Mac since you can't plug into the iOS SDK otherwise. If I'm mistaken, that would be great news.
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At first glance I think you are correct. But I'm going to give the Android dev for Windows are try for work stuff.
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This week, DevExpress announced the release of DXtreme Enterprise, its new tools suite for building apps for Windows 8, iOS and Android.
All I need is VS2012 (the support for VS2010 will come fast) to target all platforms at once, even able to publish to an App Store. All of this without needing to buy any Android or Apple gadget.
The tool has emulators for several devices.
eWeek article[^]
DevExpress DXtreme site[^]
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I went through the same dilemma recently. I won a contract to right a native app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, as well as a mobile web version. I owned neither a Mac nor an iOS device.
After much research I decided to go with Xamarin's tools. The iOS app is complete and I'm happy with my decision. I don't remember the price but for about $750 I got both MonoTouch and Mono for Android. In particular, the MonoTouch.Dialog module makes it very quick to write apps that involve traversing data.
Originally I tried to run OS X inside VirtualBox. It actually worked pretty well but it took me a while to get there, and accidentally allowing updates would break the system. Once I considered the time I had spent in this I broke down and bought a new Mac Mini. I also bought a used iPhone 3GS from GameStop.
My advice is that if you write code for a living (as opposed to a hobbyist) and you want to write native apps without learning ObjectiveC, just pony up the bucks for a cheap Mac and MonoTouch. If you don't need the Mac when you're done, Apple fanboys are insane and will pay nearly full price for it used.
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