Mobile Development with C#

Chapter 2. Hello, Platforms!

Since you have to crawl before you can walk, this chapter will introduce each platform individually and create a simple application for each of them. Like all “Hello, World!” applications, the one you build in this chapter will be overly simplistic, consisting of just two screens. On the first screen will be a button labeled “Click Me!” When that is clicked, the application will navigate to a second screen, which will display text sent to it from the first screen. To keep things simple, it can just send and display the time at which the button was clicked. The goal of this chapter is to get your feet wet in each platform while taking a look at the pieces and environments involved in creating them.

iOS

Let’s start with iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system. The main prerequisite for doing iOS development, or any Apple-based development for that matter, is that you need to be running Mac OS X. This is a restriction set by Apple, so even though you will be using .NET to build the application, there is no getting around this limitation.

On top of the operating system, in order to get up and running with iOS development, you’ll need to install these software packages:

• Xcode 4

• Mono Framework

• MonoDevelop

• MonoTouch

Xcode is Apple’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and also includes other tools such as the iOS simulator, a user interface designer, and the SDKs for Mac OS X and iOS. It is available for download from either the OS X App Store or from Apple’s iOS ...