Following on from the post about iPhone development using MonoTouch and C#, I thought I would point out the fact that at the moment MonoTouch doesn’t support Visual Basic for iPhone development. Mono and MonoDevelop themselves do support VB, but just not for iPhone dev just yet. The MonoTouch team say it is on the roadmap, just no date as of yet.

So where does that leave the Visual Basic developer? Well, if they want to write iPhone apps using the .NET framework, then needing to learn some C#.

For many VB developers, who came to .NET from VB6 (and below), stepping up to a fully object orientated language and the .NET framework was tough enough to grasp, let alone taking on dealing with curly braces as well. Whilst VB.NET is not the same language as VB6, Microsoft did a pretty good job at smoothing the upgrade path for developers (certainly with VS2005 and .NET 2.0 upwards anyway).

Many developers will probably have some exposure to other languages, such as PHP, JavaScript, or even Java (remember that?), all of which would make learning C# a bit easier, but if you haven’t then don’t worry too much. If you know the .NET framework, then you’re already halfway there.

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