Jolt Awards: Coding Tools

Andrew Binstock, January 09, 2012 Going to the very heart of the developer's toolbox, we select four outstanding tools.
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Jolt Productivity Award: Xamarin MonoTouch and Mono for Android

For a product that was thought to be left in limbo when Attachmate bought Novell and disbanded the Mono project, the team that created MonoTouch and Mono for Android reassembled under the Xamarin name, polished up their product, and came out with a stunning follow-up that silenced critics who said that Mono development was a dead.

Both MonoTouch and Mono for Android are development environments designed for developers well versed in the C# syntax and Microsoft .NET Framework. There still remains a steep learning curve, especially for those using MonoTouch, due to Apple's Objective-C based SDKs and the fact that the user interface still requires an Apple computer running OSX 10.7 and Xcode 4 to do the builds. But Mono for Android makes C# .NET developers more at home via its Visual Studio plug-in, although the experience is far from seamless. Nevertheless, Xamarin is the only game in town when it comes to C# developers seeking to leverage their experience on non-Microsoft mobile platforms. — Mike Riley


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