Installation

Basic Requirements

To begin using MonoTouch, you will need to have:

• Apple's iPhone SDK 3.2 or higher, available from Apple's iPhone Dev Center (http://developer.apple.com/iphone/).
• An Intel Mac computer running MacOS 10.5 or 10.6 (Leopard or Snow Leopard).
• The latest release of Mono for OSX

* You MUST install the latest release of Mono before installing MonoTouch

With the iPhone SDK you will be able to write applications and test them on the iPhone simulator.

Additionally, if you want to deploy the resulting applications on the device for AppStore, Ad-Hoc or Enterprise distribution you will need to be part of the iPhone developer program (http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/).

Make sure that you can launch the iPhone simulator before continuing to the next step.

Mono Installation

Mono can be downoaded from the main Mono website.  The current release of Mono comes in a Disk Image.  Double click the Installer package and follow the prompted instructions. 

MonoTouch SDK Installation

MonoTouch can be downloaded from the URL that was provided in the email you received from Novell when you purchased MonoTouch.  If you have not purchased MonoTouch yet, you can buy it on our store, or you can download an evaluation version which enables development and testing against the iPhone simulator only.

* You MUST install the latest release of Mono before installing MonoTouch

Installing MonoTouch will give you access to the command line tools to develop applications with MonoTouch.  If you are downloading a purchased copy of MonoTouch Personal Edition or Enterprise Edition, you will be prompted for your personal information to activate your copy of MonoTouch, fill the following form:

We keep your email information in case you want to contact us about a problem about your activation, if you need to reinstall your system and need to reactivate or have any support questions.   

If you do not want to complete this step at this point, you can close this dialog window.  When you are ready to activate, you can do this by opening the "MonoTouch Activation" application located in:

/Developer/MonoTouch/Applications/MonoTouch Activation

If you choose, you can stop here, the SDK provided contains the tools that you need to build iPhone applications using a text editor, and the iPhone SDK. The tutorials on this site will guide you through the steps of getting your sample applications running from the command line.

If you want to have an integrated development experience, you need to setup the MonoDevelop IDE on your system as well.   Installation of MonoDevelop is covered on the next section.

If you want to be able to debug the system libraries you should also install the monotouch-source package, but this is an optional component only required if you which to debug the BCL.

MonoDevelop Installation

To get your apps up and running in the shortest amount of time, you will want to install MonoDevelop on your system.

To get MonoDevelop 2.4 up and running, you need:

• The latest version of Mono for OSX from the Mono downloads page (http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads).
• The latest MonoTouch version of MonoDevelop OS X from the MonoDevelop website (http://monodevelop.com/Download/Mac_MonoTouch).

* You MUST use the MonoTouch version of MonoDevelop from the above link, or the version from MonoDevelop's built-in updater, since it may contains fixes that are not in MonoDevelop 2.4.

Release History