.NET Development of iPhone App with MonoTouch - which development environment?

I'm a .NET developer (C#) with several years developing Windows Mobile Apps. I would like to get into developing iPhone Apps and MonoTouch looks good based on reviews I've read. So I'm going to go with MonoTouch.

My understanding is that I'll need a new Mac, but as it happens I also need a new PC for my .NET windows development. My question is should I

(a) Purchase a Mac Book Pro and du开发者_开发问答al boot with Windows 7

(b) Purchase a Mac Pro and dual boot with Windows 7

(c) Purchase a good Dev PC and a slighlty less well spec'd Mac Book Pro or Mac Pro

Bear in mind I'm only doing MonoTouch development with the Mac, most of my development (approx. 80% initially) will be done on the Windows side.

My budget is approx. €3,000 / $4,000 and I'd like a good, fast development environment.It's purely for development so on the windows side installing SQL 2008/VS 2010/Office and on the OS X side installing MonoTouch. BTW - my budget excludes licensing for VS/MonoTouch/etc, I have a MonoTouch and MSDN license.

Any opinions are greatly appreciated. I'm a newbie to Mac's !

Over the last year I've increasingly found myself doing iOS development over web development. I went from using a quad core Dell laptop with 8GB of RAM to a MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM and haven't looked back. VMWare Fusion runs Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 plenty fast on the SSD.

For MonoTouch dev, you are probably going to want to stay with MonoDevelop. That will run fine no matter what Mac you choose. The windows side and whether or not portability matters to you are the main question marks.

I'd say A or B depending on if which Mac you want. I run a dual boot Mac and do quite a bit of .NET development and SQL on the Windows Boot portion (Windows 7 Ultimate) and XCode development on the Mac portion and it works great. If you also get Parallels for the Mac you can run them simultaneously.

As a side note, I wanted to keep my initial investment small and my Mac is just a Mac Mini with 4 GB of RAM. So getting one of the higher performance macs should be even better. I still had a Windows machine with comparable specs, but it was so much easier just to dual boot and I felt the performance was maybe even a little better, that I hardly ever use my Windows only machine at all.

Running Windows 7 in a virtual machine with WM Fusion works great for me. I have objective c code that calls web services that are running in the Windows 7 VM with no issues. Just make sure whatever machine you go with has lots of RAM (8GB+) if you run virtual.

A Mac mini may be your most cost efficient way to get into it. And purchase a MacBook Pro if you see it as something you will be doing long term.

Id go with a dedicated dev windows machine and Mac Mini. My mac mini(last gen) with 4gb ram is plenty fast for iphone dev tasks. It will be nice to have both the windows and mac machines running at the same time to increase productivity

If portability is a concern then the macbook pro is the way to go...although i'd still prefer to have a dedicated windows desktop as well if my budget allowed, which yours seems to.

For the windows box...you can easily build/buy a very fast machine for under $1000...Add another 3-400 for a nice dual monitor setup, then use whats left to spec out the Mac of your choice.

If you are doing 80% windows development, you'd probably prefer to do all your monotouch development in visual studio. This is possible with some simple changes to the monotouch project files. With monotouch you can do everything in code, you do not need interface builder.

This way, you will end up using your Mac just to compile and do some testing. I would suggest to buy a small MacBook or even a fancy MacBook Air, because you can easily take it with you.

I would defenitely use a separate windows machine, because it is much more handy for ad-hoc testing without having to reboot.

My only advice is not to skimp on the Mac. I'm developing right now on a 1.6 GHz rev 1 MacBook Air with 2GB RAM, and compile time -- especially the native compilation step -- is coffee-break time, even on a fairly small project.

I have used both a 17" MBP 2.4ghz, 4gb ram, and the new 13" MBA (1.86ghz, 4gb ram, 128gb SSD). Both are quite fast for average projects, but the main thing I've found is that Parallels and/or VMWare are both very memory intensive. I opt for the dual-boot method, and both OSes are very quick and responsive. If I were avoiding the laptop requirement, a 27" iMac has an amazing display and the specs are quite nice, for win7 or OSX.

But mostly, go with at least 4gb ram on Mac hardware and you will be set.

Fixed Hardware

My experience with mac tells me that Mac mini is better because, Macs are not customizable, and comes with fix hardware and fix things. Plus if you have problem with device drives for any of devices for future windows OS, then there is no choice because apple does not care for releasing any device drivers for windows OS.

Hard disk Partitions

Mac does not let you touch its hard disk if your mac fails to start for some reason. It does not let you create more then one partition for windows. Other partitions of windows are not accessible by mac. If you do something wrong with partitions, data loss can be huge.

Hardware Upgrades

Good Dev PC can be used to upgrade your machine as you wish, custom setup and installation is possible.

For a price of good Mac, you can get decent PC with multiple monitors and you can upgrade your internal hardware later on. Buy better graphics card, sound card etc.