Windows Phone 7 to iPhone development (backwards I know)

Question

I've been doing a lot of Windows Phone 7 games development and have started looking into porting my apps and games to iPhone and possibly Android at a later date.

From my understanding solutions such as MonoTouch are not worth the effort, so should I stear clear of such things?

I'm well versed in C++ coding and would like to do that on the iPhone if I can't use C# effectively, especially for performance critical situations which games have a lot of. I don't underestimate the power of C#, just C# on iPhone (and I think that's a fair thing to be afraid of).

Would there be any good reading material I should get into before building up code for iPhone? I'm already downloading x-code but don't know what to do beyond that, I odn't even know how to wrap C++ around objective-c but I feel that would be the best compromise given my situation.

I guess a broader question is how would I handle multiplatform programming? My currnet idea is to build three seperate development frameworks which share the same design principles as each other so porting apps between platforms is straight forward (but would still require re-writing code every time).

Is that a smart way to do it or am I just crazy?

Answer 1

C# on the iPhone not only works fine, but it works brilliantly. It is compiled AOT that is "Ahead of Time" (normally .NET code is compiled JIT - "Just in Time") down to machine code just like a normal compiler would produce. It's absolutely fast enough for game development and about 100 times easier to use.

I have two XNA games working on iOS and my own crowd-funded iOS port of XNA, which is also coming soon to Android (ExEn). So I can definately confirm that C# on iOS is fine for game development.

Now if you're doing a 3D game, I'd be looking into Unity. The cross-platform XNA solutions are all 2D-only - for the moment anyway. The other option is using OpenGL directly with the bindings in MonoTouch.

Basically you should do everything you possibly can to avoid having to write your game more than once. To that end, C# is an excellent choice.

Answer 2

You don' have to wrap c++ around objective-c. c++ compiles just fine on the iPhone. You can easily develop all your code for multiplatform games in c++. What I don't know is how c++ compiles on wp7, but that's another issue :)