text: >>.
  How great would it be if you could develop in C# for iOS, Android, and Windows phone with one code tree from Visual Studio? It is possible if you buy Xamarian's products right now but if MS buys them, then it would be built into VS and available to anyone who has a license for their dev tools and it would make MS's tools the best way to do mobile development.
  With .NET open sourced and Microsoft opening up for external contributions, like patches to port to other platforms(?), Mono is about to lose its unique selling point.
  Why would you go with the, not that compatible, clone while the original offers the same but is better maintained, has more users and customers, is the de facto reference and is rolled out and in used in thausend of factors more projects and products, why?
  Also, Mono is owned by Xamarin and non-free-beer, cost money, to proper use Android/iOS API while .NET and the Foundation driving it doesn't seem to be interested to limit its usage to make profits with licenses.
  Point is if .NET then .NET. I don't see room for alternates now that Microsoft removed its biggest limitations. But then maybe there are still valid use-cases for something like Mono?
  Edited 2014-04-06 08:36 UTC
  I hope so. Mono is the least open source project I can think of. They have licensed the code in such a way that it is impossible to do anything with the source to target a platform that requires static linking, and even more recently have begun attempting to limit the embedding of their runtime in Apps. This is solely to sell iOS, Android and Mac App store licenses (all priced as individual purchases.) Especially for the Mac, this seems entirely underhanded, as there was a long history of embedding the Runtime in apps to avoid requiring a Mono Runtime download.
  That's not really true. The MonoTouch apps on the iOS platform (of which there are a lot) all exist because of Mono, not Microsoft. Mono, on an API level, is more than just "not that compatible", but it doesn't support WinForms (fully) and WPF (at all?), so I guess if that is your yardstick, it's half baked.
  It costs money to use any flavour of the Xamarin UI API namespaces, bar the very basic and limited free version. MonoMac is still free, but I believe they also force the same embedding rules, which are draconian.
  However, Mono isn't owned by Xamarin as far as I remember. It's owned by Novell and Xamarin have a "perpetual license" allowing them to continue to develop and sell Mono. If Novell chose to revoke that license for some reason, Xamarin would be as screwed as the customers they support.
  Remobjects just released a C# compiler that targets various native platforms directly - without a .Net runtime. Have a gander at
  Edited 2014-04-07 12:34 UTC
  Member since:
  2010-10-27
  A.