Professional iPhone® Programming with MonoTouch and .NET/C#

Chapter 8. Application Settings

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Exploring the Info.plist

• Peeking in the settings bundle

• Reading and updating your settings

This chapter focuses on application settings, and looks at two aspects of settings for your MonoTouch app: the Info.plist and your settings bundle.

• The Info.plist contains some basic information about your app and how it should look and behave.

• Your settings bundle is where you would keep data that you need to persist from session to session.

This chapter looks at what settings you might want to set in your Info.plist and why, and then looks at what code it takes to read and use the settings that you save in the settings bundle.

This chapter also takes you through the building of the settings that you might have in a social media-type application. Going through each step, you will examine the Root.plist inside the Property List Editor and see the settings dialog that will result from it.

EXPLORING THE INFO.PLIST

Info.plist is short for information property list, and it is a structured text file that contains essential configuration information for your app. The file itself is encoded using the Unicode UTF-8 encoding and the contents are structured using XML. The root XML node is called "<plist>" and inside that you have the dictionary node "<dict>," whose contents are a set of keys and values describing different aspects of your app bundle. The iPhone OS uses these keys and values to obtain information about your application and how it is configured ...