iOS iPad programming...Please be nice...

[Terabull]

I am a Microsoft VB junkie for it's ease of use. PERIOD. Agree or disagree, it doesn't matter. I now have an iphone and iPad and DAMN, I love them. I know there are IDE's that you guys like and even love. But from a VB standpoint is there anything out there that will at least ease the transition? PLEASE don't judge and say go cold turkey Mac IDE. Top of my list would be a VB translation IDE to get my own personal apps on the iphone/ipad up and running quickly.
I appreciate any help you guys can give. MS to Mac convert?.....I very well could be.

 

[ApplEngineer]

I am a Microsoft VB junkie for it's ease of use. PERIOD. Agree or disagree, it doesn't matter. I now have an iphone and iPad and DAMN, I love them. I know there are IDE's that you guys like and even love. But from a VB standpoint is there anything out there that will at least ease the transition? PLEASE don't judge and say go cold turkey Mac IDE. Top of my list would be a VB translation IDE to get my own personal apps on the iphone/ipad up and running quickly.
I appreciate any help you guys can give. MS to Mac convert?.....I very well could be.

There's a Mac programming forum that would probably get you more responses. Second of all due to the new restrictions in the SDK, it seems very unlikely that you would be able to use a VB to Objective-C translation tool. I personally don't know of one. The best bet would be is to start learning objective-c and then build from there. Good thing is that there are A Lot of tutorials online.

A good start to ease the transition is for you to understand object oriented programming. Are you very familiar with OOP concepts? Hope this helps, a good book to pick up is "Beginning iPhone Development" published by APress.

Good Luck

 

[nutmac]

PLEASE don't judge and say go cold turkey Mac IDE.

Unfortunately, that is your only choice at the moment. Xcode with iPhone SDK is your only option for writing apps that would get accepted by Apple's App Store.

Well, technically you can write the code in any IDE (all of which would provide inferior experience as they lack integration with iPhone SDK), but you must still compile using the iPhone SDK, which only runs on Mac OS X.

 

[Genyus]

The closest answer to what you're after is MonoTouch, which allows development of iPhone OS apps using the .NET framework with two important caveats:

1. As the previous respondents commented, the updated Developer Agreement has left question marks over the future of the toolkit, but the project developers believe it will still be possible to operate within the new boundaries defined by Apple.
2. It currently only supports C#, not VB.NET. They do mention VB.NET as a future option, but there is currently no ETA on when this will arrive, so at this point in time, you're going to have to learn a "curly-braces" language of one variety or another.

 

[flyingturtle]

I also do a fair amount of Microsoft Dot NET programming as well, so I was looking at MonoTouch too. For me, I know C# fairly well so that wasn't an obstacle, but it really came down to price. You'll have to pay $399 (or $999+ if doing Enterprise development) for MonoTouch, and that's on top of the $99 Apple Developer fee that everyone has to pay if you are planning to sell your apps.

In the end, I just brushed up on my C and C++ skills and learned Objective-C and used the native Mac XCode, which is a fairly nice IDE.

So if economics play a part in your decision, Apple gives all the stuff you need for free (don't need to pay $99 to just download the SDK), while you'll have to pay for MonoTouch.

In either situation you're going to have to learn Objective-C/C or C# (at least for right now).

Also worth mentioning are other non-Objective-C solutions. There is also PhoneGap and Titanium which won't require you to learn Objective-C/C. PhoneGap uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript to make iPhone/iPad apps. Titanium also uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but with added options to code in Ruby, Python, PHP, etc.

There's also GameSalad, which I haven't used, but I hear it's fairly easy to use, and geared toward people who have limited or non-existent coding abilities.

I still see GameSalad apps being approved (an acquaintance of mine got his Ipad app made with gamesalad approved a couple days ago) so I'm thinking Apple is, at least for now, letting people use GameSalad, Phonegap, Titanium and other 3rd party compilers. Apple's new approval policy restrictions seems for the most part just targeting Adobe's CS5 Flash to iPhone compiler. But who knows, Apple could change policies or reinterpret existing ones at anytime. So far they seem pretty lenient, as long as it isn't Flash/Adobe-related.

 

[Terabull]

I appreciate the responses. Somehow I knew it wouldn't be an easy VB port.
Looks like I only have 1 or 2 options. Again thanks for the information.

 

[firewood]

Don't forget that you can develop web apps for the iPhone in Javascript, and that's a lot more forgiving an environment than C.