Building iPhone applications on Windows Desktop ?

I don't think it's possible. iPhone SDK is available only for Mac OSX and not sure if it ever be made available on Windows.

You're not going to be able to create an iphone executable on a PC. I doubt that they will ever provide one. Someone might black-box a compiler, but then you take your chances.

On the other hand, you should be able to do the automation on the PC as long as the compilation actually takes place on a mac. If you set up some network system where the PC tells the mac that it needs to compile (you may have to manually create the make files, I'm not sure if xcode can be scripted and run from php or something).

I'm not sure that that actually helps you any... the code still needs to be on the mac, so you might as well just have the mac automate itself, I guess.

We are in the same situation where we have our mobile application building on the PC for a number of mobile platforms. We are looking into building everything on a mac using parallels.

Stephen

XCode just used gcc under the hood to do the builds. I don't see why you couldn't just install gcc on a windows box and run the build there. You'd have to copy over all the libraries and support files it need to run the build and link and you certainly wouldn't be getting any support from Apple, but I bet you could get it working if you really needed to.

i'll throw this out there as a suggestion keeping in mind i have no idea what your windows build process looks like.

Consider keeping a mac online in your shop.. create an automator or applescript to monitor a directory or file out on your windows network to help kick start the xcode compiler to push deliverables and/or source code to wherever your process needs it. in addition versioning with something like visual sourcesafe could be accomplished in a similar manor.

My bet is that something similar as i described would be more doable and desirable than duck taping a compiler to run on a windows box.