Will MonoTouch require a Mac to publish to the iPhone/iPod Touch?

Question

I have never done any iPhone or iPod Touch development, much due to the additional need for a Mac to develop on, plus needing to learn Objective-C. With the announcement of MonoTouch now I can use .NET languages I am already familiar with, and develop on my Windows PC.

However I am curious if I will still need a Mac to deploy and test my iPhone application? So what tools are necessary for iPhone touch and which ones of those will run on Windows with MonoTouch?

Answer 1

Seeing as the codesigning tool necessary to sign the application for execution on the device is undocumented and only available for OS X I think it is a safe bet that you can only actually build an app for deployment on OS X.

While it technically may be possible to compile apps under some other OS, with the simulator or the codesign tool you have no way to test them, so you will need a Mac available in order to do that anyway. I suppose it might also be possible to test against jailbroken device, but I would not want to ship an app that had not been tested a stock OS firmware.

Answer 2

The seeds for an answer are embedded in your question. From the project page:

MonoTouch requires a Mac and Apple's iPhone SDK to test on the emulator; And you will need to be an Apple iPhone developer to deploy on the device.