How does Xamarin work exactly? It does seem like magic, right? I mean, writing C# in Visual Studio and compiling a native iOS, Mac, or Android application on the other side does seem magical. A lot of technology has gone into giving developers the ability to do this. With iOS and Mac applications, the process is somewhat involved. One thing to be aware of if you want to target iOS or Mac is that you will need to use a Mac in order to build your iOS applications. There are services out there that make Macs available for remote testing and compilation (such as MacinCloud, http://www.macincloud.com/). These, however, do incur a monthly cost. When Xamarin compiles your C# code, it does so against a special subset of the Mono framework.
Mono is sponsored by Microsoft and is an open source implementation of the .NET Framework. This is based on...