Xamarin Delivers MonoTouch 5.2 for iOS App Development

Xamarin, a maker of development software for building cross-platform mobile apps for phones and tablets, has announced an update of its MonoTouch 5.2 software for developing iPhone and iPad apps.

MonoTouch 5.2 adds capabilities to improve application performance, streamline the development process and reduce the time it takes to build iPhone and iPad apps with a native user experience.

Powerful capabilities

“Xamarin’s cross-platform development products, MonoTouch and Mono for Android, provide the power of the .NET frameworks that millions of developers already use, along with complete access to all native APIs and UI toolkits for iOS and Android; this allows you to create truly unique native experiences on each operating system,” said Miguel de Icaza, chief technology officer of Xamarin, in a statement. “Now with MonoTouch 5.2, we are giving developers powerful capabilities to build better quality iPhone and iPad apps faster and easier than available anywhere else.”

MonoTouch 5.2 features MonoTouch.Dialog, a new API that enables developers to create Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) compliant iOS forms and dialog boxes, and to show table-based information without having to write dozens of delegates and controllers for the user interface. It includes UITableView support and pull-to-refresh, as well as built-in searching.

Also new in MonoTouch 5.2 is the MonoTouch memory profiler, which provides new tooling to enable developers to track managed objects’ memory usage growth, which objects are still referenced and from where they are being referenced. Other new memory features include a Generational Garbage Collector and improved Garbage Collection Diagnostics.

Meanwhile, another key new feature is Touch.Unit, a new unit testing framework for developers to perform on-device testing of individual functions and procedures in MonoTouch applications.

MonoTouch 5.2 also includes more than 300 additional enhancements that make it easier to develop great iOS applications. A full listing of new features and capabilities can be viewed on the company blog.

“MonoTouch already provides a great environment to quickly build really powerful apps,” said Tony Fonager, chief technology officer of Netcoders ApS, Denmark, in a statement. “The new MonoTouch.Dialog features in MonoTouch 5.2 are a real time saver because now we can build common iPhone and iPad dialogs easier and faster without having to deal directly with UITableViews, delegates and data sources.”

Android support

In December 2011, Xamarin announced the release of Mono open source .NET development platform for Android 4.0.

Xamarin announced the availability of Mono for Android 4.0, the first release from Xamarin that allows C# developers to target Android tablet devices, such as Kindle Fire, Motorola Xoom and Samsung GALAXY Tab.

With that release, Xamarin provided access to all the new features introduced by Google on their Android 4.0 operating system, code named Ice Cream Sandwich.

That Mono release featured a plug-in for Microsoft’s Visual Studio that enables .NET developers to develop applications for Android. That release also includes a new, incremental build technology that reduces debugging and development cycles, the company said.

“Thousands of developers depend on Xamarin to build the newest applications for mobile devices,” said de Icaza at the time of that Mono for Android announcement. “We bring C# and .NET to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, but we bring it with style. We provide developers with the power of the .NET frameworks that they are used to, along with complete access to all of the native APIs and UI toolkits unique to each operating system, allowing developers to create truly unique native experiences on each operating system.”