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

Question

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 dual 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 !

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.