When creating iOS apps, developers typically turn to the languages and IDE provided by Apple: Objective-C / Swift and Xcode. However, this isn’t the only option—you can create iOS apps using a variety of languages and frameworks.
One of the most popular options is, a cross-platform framework that allows you to develop iOS, Android, OS X and Windows apps using C# and Visual Studio. The major benefit here is Xamarin can allow you to share code between your iOS and Android app. Xamarin has a big advantage over other cross-platform frameworks: with Xamarin, your project compiles to native code, and can use native APIs under the hood. This means a well written Xamarin app should be indistinguishable from an app made with Xcode.
For more details, check out this great article. Xamarin had a big disadvantage too in the past too: its price.
Because of the steep licensing cost of $1,000 per platform per year, you’d have to give up your daily latte or frappuccino to even think about affording it and programming without coffee can get dangerous. Because of this steep price, until recently Xamarin appealed mostly to enterprise projects with big budgets. However, this recently changed when Microsoft purchased Xamarin and announced that it would be included in all new versions of Visual Studio, including the free that’s available to individual developers and small organizations.
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Now that’s a price to celebrate! More money for coffee! Besides cost (or lack thereof), Xamarin’s other virtues include allowing programmers to:.
Change Allow access to Only these users and add a user that has access to Xamarin and Xcode on the Mac. Dismiss the instructions and return to your Windows computer. Back in Visual Studio, you will be asked to select the Mac as the build host. Select your Mac and click Connect. Enter the username and password, then click Login. You will eventually have to use xcode no matter what. Better to learn it now, and get it over with. I've seen people that customized the IDE of xcode to look similar to VS. I havent done anything with that though. VS has an easier interface to work with. I've been using mac, and Linux more than windows for most of my life.
Leverage existing C# libraries and tools to create mobile apps. Reuse code between apps on different platforms.
Share code between ASP.Net backends and customer-facing apps. Xamarin also offers a choice of tools, depending on your needs. To maximize cross-platform code reuse, use. This works especially well for apps that don’t need platform-specific functionality or a particularly custom interface. If your app does require platform-specific features or designs, use, and other platform-specific modules to get direct interaction with native APIs and frameworks. These modules provide the flexibility to create very custom user interfaces, yet still allow sharing of common code across platforms.
In this tutorial, you’ll use Xamarin.iOS to create an iPhone app that displays a user’s photo library. This tutorial doesn’t require any prior iOS or Xamarin development experience, but to get the most from it you’ll need a basic understanding of C#. Getting Started To develop an iOS app with Xamarin and Visual Studio, you’ll ideally need two machines:. A Windows machine to run Visual Studio and write your project’s code. A Mac machine with Xcode installed to act as a build host. This doesn’t have to be a dedicated computer for building, but it must be network accessible during development and testing from your Windows computer.
It greatly helps if your machines are physically near each other, since when you build and run on Windows, the iOS Simulator will load on your Mac. I can hear some of you saying, “What if I don’t have both machines?!”. For Mac-only users, Xamarin does provide an IDE for OS X, but in this tutorial we will be focusing on the shiny new Visual Studio support. So if you’d like to follow along, you can run Windows as a virtual machine on your Mac. Tools such as or the free, open-source make this an effective way to use a single computer. If using Windows as a virtual machine, you’ll need to ensure that Windows has network access to your Mac.
In general, if you can ping your Mac’s IP address from inside Windows, you should be good to go. For Windows-only users, go buy a Mac right now. I’ll wait!: If that’s not an option, hosted services such as or provide remote Mac access for building.
This tutorial assumes you’re using separate Mac and Windows computers, but don’t worry—the instructions are basically the same if you’re using Windows inside a virtual machine on your Mac. Installing Xcode and Xamarin If you don’t have it already, on your Mac. This is just like installing any other app from the App Store, but since it’s several gigabytes of data, it may take a while. Note: You won’t see this instance variable within ViewController.cs itself.
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To see the the instance variable, click the disclosure indicator to the left of ViewController.cs to reveal ViewController.designer.cs inside. This contains the collectionView instance variable automatically generated by Visual Studio. Open ViewController.cs from the Solution Explorer and add the following field right inside the class: private PhotoCollectionDataSource photoDataSource; At the end of ViewDidLoad, add these lines to instantiate the data source and connect it to the collection view. PhotoDataSource = new PhotoCollectionDataSource; collectionView.DataSource = photoDataSource; This way the photoDataSource will provide the data for the collection view. Build and run. You should see the collection view with seven blue squares. Nice – the app is really coming along!
Showing Photos While blue squares are cool, you’ll next update the data source to actually retrieve photos from the device and display them on the collection view. You’ll use the Photos framework to access photo and video assets managed by the Photos app. To start, you’ll add a view to display an image on the collection view cell. Open Main.storyboard again and select the collection view cell. On the Widget tab, scroll down and change the Background color back to the default. Open the Toolbox, search for Image View, then drag an Image View onto the collection view Cell.
The image view will initially be much larger than the cell; to resize it, select the image view and go to the Properties Layout tab. Under the View section, set both the X and Y values to 0 and the Width and Height values to 100.
Switch to the Widget tab for the image view and set the Name as cellImageView. Visual Studio will automatically create a field named cellImageView for you. Scroll to the View section and change the Mode to Aspect Fill. This keeps the images from becoming stretched.
Mogren, You should be able to run the same code from within Xcode that your classmates are running within VS C. There may be a few caveats to that approach, as I believe that Visual C implements some keywords that are not available in ISO standard C.
But you should be able to just remove the offending key words when you're running in Xcode. Find some classmates that are running Linux and see how they've worked around the issues. Either way, when you create your new project in Xcode, choose Command Line Utility C Tool as your project type. You will then be able to edit and run your programs right from Xcode, with the command line output showing up in the project's run log.
Mogren; I routinely build identical command line projects in both Xcode and Visual Studio. There is no problem doing what you suggest, with the caveats of keeping away from micro$oft specific syntax. Be warned, in visual studio's default settings, you will get numerious messages about standard C and C functions being 'Depreciated' in favor of some micro$oft specific syntax. Ignore these messages when you build your code and do NOT change to the micro$oft specific syntax. This is micro$oft's way to try to lock you into their development system. If you stick to ANSI/ISO standard syntax you should be fine going back a forth between the systems. One other difference that caught me was default stack size.
In Xcode the default allocated stack is 8Mb. The is big enough to do most of what I need to do. In visual studio it is only 1Mb. A single array 320x320 of floats will use almost this entire stack space in visual studio.
When reallocating the stack in visual studio be sure to use BOTH the /F flag in the compiler and the /STACK flag in the linker. Both are required. If you can, stick to Xcode. It's a much better development system.
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