>C# is really a fanstastic language. But the downsides of being tied to the Windows/MSSQL/IIS platform is like have a boat anchor around your ankle. Similarly, how many people are excited about windows 8 vs. iOS or android?
Great times for Xamarin.
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As an iOS developer, I'm interested in Windows Phone. In my past I programmed a bit with the .NET API's (mainly VB, later on a little bit of C#). I've recently dabbled in Android, and personally I don't like the tooling (Eclipse, emulator slow).
Just last week I downloaded the MonoTouch toolkit and will experiment a bit with creating a multi-platform (iOS / Android) app with a partially shared codebase in C#. So far I like the following things about the MonoTouch toolkit:
a) UIKit methods / classes are called more or less the same. Don't need to look up the API much.
b) from what I understand, it should be possible to create my own wrappers around Obj-C (iOS) or Java (Android) objects.
c) Create optimised user interfaces for each platform. This is the part where the code will differ mostly.
d) MonoDevelop is a nice, though somewhat sparse / limited IDE. I really hate the future creep of Eclipse and imo Visual Studio could also use a little trimming in the UI - otherwise a fine product though. I love Xcode.
Yup, and I found C# versions of UIKit classes more convenient to code against.
Regarding your point about MonoDevelop, I won't spill the beans but Xamarin is preparing something exciting to fix IDE problems right now.