MonoTouch connect to Azure ACS, Azure SQL / Azure

Question

I'm going to make the iOS application and wondering on differences between development with new language Objective C with Cocoa or old language C# with Mono-Touch

The requirement of the application should be work with azure and store/retrieve information to store on local device frequently, content browsing and token login to the portal, the deadline is 2 month from today and i never develop any iPhone / iPad application previously. May i know which is easier to start and is there any resources for Mono ? while i find it's great if i could use the old programming language but seem there're no such thing to support monoTouch azure development...

Thank you for reply.

Answer 1

First of all your have asked lots of things in one post. About your first question the answer is very much subjective. Objective C/Cocoa is native language for iOS development however using MonoTouch, will require you to depend on whatever is provided by MonoTouch. So if it is not part of MonoTouch you wouldn't be able to do it. Here you can find lots of opinions by other fellow SO users: MonoTouch & C# VS Objective C for iphone app

I can give you some guidance on Windows Azure development from any mobile device. Connecting to different services running on Windows Azure from any mobile device is same. Most of the services provide direct HTTP/HTTPS connection if the application is running on Azure and exposed an HTTP or HTTPs endpoint or for Azure Storage you are making direct RESTful call from you code. So it does not matter which coding language you will use in mobile decide, you sure can connect to Windows Azure with native language.

So if you choose Objective C then you can use iOS SDK for Windows Azure. However if you decide to use MonoTouch, you would need to use WebClient API to create your own HTTP/HTTPS connection something described here, which could be comparative complex. On internet you may find some experiment level code to use Azure services and MonoTouch application so you may be by your own to try to get things working.

I personally will not use MonoTouch to develop application on iOS devices, if I am heavily dependent on Windows Azure Services, instead I will choose iOS Windows Azure SDK to connect Azure Service through native code.