MonoCross - a very thin layer on top Xamarin code . (See what is the Xamarin sticker in the upper right corner?)
They suggest reusing the same MVC code for different implementations like MonoTouch and MonoDroid.
Refusal of MVC works for small samples, but these guys seem to have a religious faith in a 100% exchange codes - something that I have not signed up. This is a great concept, but it has never worked in real life.
Creating different applications is difficult, but I do not think this is difficult because database technology are different or because you have to write similar classes for ASP.NET MVC, MonoTouch or MonoDroid. If this were a real software development problem, we would have solved it many years ago.
MonoCross seems an exercise in premature generalization - something that they love all programmers.
But abstraction is not free. Consider this anecdote Eric Gunnersona:
I know the team, where the snowball - it turned out to be a component of the "Swiss army knife", which has been used in a variety of different scenarios. And, like many other components that make a lot, he was a big, complex, and had a lot of difficult behavior understandable. But this development was an interesting technical challenge for developers (read that "fun and useful for their careers," ...)
The problem arose when the team discovered that one operation took about 4 times as long as it should. But because of the generalized nature of the component that performs the operation, there was no easy way to optimize it.
If the operation was designed from scratch without using the "uber component", there would be a few simple optimization approaches. But none of them will not work on generalized component, because you might not be easy to implement optimization in one scenario - he had to work for all scenarios. You could not afford the cost of the developer, to make it work everywhere, and in this case, even if you could, this may lead to the fact that the performance will regress in other scenarios.
(Emphasis mine.)
While Monocross developers are enthusiastic about it , it seems that there is no community around the project, and I could not find one application built on top of iFactr or MonoCross.
In saying this, I do not think they offer something of value in MonoTouch or MonoDroid.
On the side, Miguel argues :-) .