In today’s release of MonoTouch 5.0.1, we’ve made it much, much easier to use native libraries from your C# code.

MonoTouch has always allowed developers to access third-party Objective-C libraries. But in the past, it required some familiarity with the way native libraries work on Unix. It also required both the native library (libMyCuteVisualization.a) and the managed binding (MyCuteVisualization.dll) to be kept in sync.

With MonoTouch 5.0.1, we have solved these problems. If you are binding native libraries, you can now use the LinkWith attribute to declaratively reference the native library as well as the command line options required to use the library.

If you are consuming a native library that someone else has bound, simply reference the managed library from MonoDevelop. That’s it. No more fussing about with extra command-line arguments and dragging libraries around.

We have updated the public MonoTouch Bindings to use the new LinkWith attribute.