Analyst admits wrong, insists MS tools for Apple still due
updated 05:15 pm EDT, Thu May 27, 2010
Global Equities thinks MS still on for iPhone tool
Analyst Trip Chowdhry tried to recover from a rebuttal of his claims by Microsoft on Thursday by insisting that some of the story of Apple-friendly developer tools was still accurate. He admitted that Microsoft wouldn't be at WWDC but claimed his sources are certain that Microsoft will have developer tools for the iPad, iPhone and Macs.
"Probably our timing is off," he argued.
The original research note from Chowdhry claimed that Microsoft would be adapting Visual Studio 2010 to support writing for Apple's devices, but it didn't address the competitive and SDK issues with such an option. The iPhone 4.0 SDK would ban Visual Studio unless the Microsoft developer kit could avoid cross compiling. Regardless of method, it would also raise competitive issues as it would appear to favor cross-platform tools from Microsoft, which also supports Windows Phone 7, but ban those from Adobe.
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Joined: Jul 2005
SDK issues
Provided VS used one of Apple's two approved compilers (their gcc fork, or clang) as a back-end, I don't see any legal issue - there's nothing that forces you to use XCode on the Mac, for instance, or even that the code must be compiled on a Mac.
The compilers themselves (gcc and clang) are open source, and people have already got these working on Windows against the header files extracted from the iPhone SDK (don't forget that even on a Mac, you're already cross-compiling to produce an ARM source code file).
What would be missing, of course, would be the iPhone emulator and integration with the debugger. The first would definitely need Apple's support - there is no way anyone could legally create a third-party emulator. The second - well that would just need a lot of work on MS part.
It's not impossible - I can see benefits to both sides in doing this - a lot of corporates using iPhones will never get Macs in just to develop iPhone apps. (Equally 3.3.1 only applies to the App Store, not to in-house development)