While the Apple App Store is without doubt the largest available medium for a mobile developer to get their app in the hands of the users, for developers new to development using C / Objective C, the barrier to entry can be quite significant. Many developers working with other platforms (particularly Windows / Windows Mobile) have made significant investment into products developed in the .net languages (e.g. C#, VB.net) and therefore may be reluctant to completely port their application to a completely new environment. Enter Novell with a commercial offering of their open source 'Mono' .net runtime dubbed 'monoTouch'. Available immediately, monoTouch enables applications developed in any .net language to run on the iPhone. Significantly, monoTouch provides .net bindings to native API, allowing application developers will have access to iPhone specific functionality from within their .net applications. monoTouch integrates with both the free MonoDevelop IDE as well as Apple's XCode toolkit.
Applications developed using monoTouch compile completely to native code - they are not JIT compiled or interpreted. While Mono itself is an open source project, monoTouch is very much a commercial offering. The entry point for monoTouch is the 'Personal Edition'', which is targeted at single developers looking to deploy applications on the App Store. The Personal Edition is priced at $399, although it should be noted that if you plan to publish your applications you will need to sign up for the iPhone Developer program at an additional cost of $99. monoTouch pricing for enterprise deployments starts at $999 for a single developer with a discounted $3999 package available for a team of 5 developers. Novell don't currently make any mention of supporting other platforms in a similar way (we're obviously thinking Android here), however it seems a logical progression to enable MonoTouch developers to deploy their applications on as many platforms as possible. Of course, when it comes to leveraging your assets on multiple platforms, .net is already a good choice for the desktop - as well as being supported on all Windows systems, mono is also available for Linux and Mac
