Gizmodo has posted something particularly brainless. They conclude that “we know it’s not an incredibly difficult process” to port a game from the iPhone to the Zune HD, because a developer managed it in 12 hours using the XNA Studio.
Yes, well, that would be more of a story if the YouTube video embedded in their post didn’t say “Game developed with MonoTouch.” MonoTouch is a framework to allow .NET application development on the iPhone, using the Mono .NET Framework which is a re-implementation of the Microsoft .NET framework.
In other words, a developer coding in Mono is capable to – shockingly – rebuild the application in another .NET environment in a very short amount of time. That’s testament to Novell’s work implementing the .NET framework – but it really shouldn’t surprising, since it’s the entire point. A .NET application built on one platform is easily portable to another – since the .NET framework is itself platform-agnostic.
In other words: No, porting games from the iPhone to the newly-released Zune HD is not that easy. As always, difficulty porting is a function of how many platform-specific libraries you use. If you develop right against the iPhone API in Objective-C, it’s going to be bloody difficult to port over to the Zune HD.
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