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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO IPHONE DEVELOPMENT WITH MONOTOUCH FOR C# DEVELOPERS
With .NET, executables are fairly small. Every application shares the .NET Framework, so
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the applications don’t have their own copy of the framework. MonoTouch is not built into
the iPhone and its applications must have their own copy of the framework; MonoTouch is
compiled into your application. The result is that MonoTouch applications are larger on disk
than a comparable Objective-C application.
Although MonoTouch is a commercially licensed product, it is still a product that is under continual
development, and MonoTouch may not have support for a specifi c namespace or assembly. You have
two options for this situation:
Wait on the implementation of that assembly from the MonoTouch product.
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Pull the necessary code or assembly into to your project. This is fairly common if the applica-
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tion needs to use code within the System.Web.* namespaces.
In addition to the technical issues of building an application for the iPhone, some design issues that
developers should be aware of include:
Don’t design an application for a desktop environment and think that it can be scaled down
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to an iPhone, or any mobile device. An iPhone does not have the display, hardware, or stor-
age of a desktop computer. iPhone and mobile device applications are really good for simple,
limited-purpose functions, but they should not do everything that a desktop application does.
The iPhone simulator is a fi ne tool, but don’t limit testing to the iPhone simulator. A simulator
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is just a simulator. There is a keyboard and a mouse associated with the iPhone simulator. To
really test a complicated design, the application must be tested from a physical iPhone.
APPLE IPHONE SDK TOOLS
When the iPhone originally shipped, you could not run third-party native applications directly on
the device — until March 6, 2008, when Apple released the fi rst beta of the SDK. The iPhone SDK
allows third parties to write applications and run them natively on the device. Since that date, there
have been a steady stream of updated beta and released versions of the iPhone SDK. Originally, the
iPhone SDK supported both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. With the beta release of the iPhone
SDK Version 3.2, Apple added support for the iPad tablet device.
Tools
The Apple SDK contains a number of tools that are important to the MonoTouch developer. These
tools are:
Xcode:
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A suite of tools for development in an Apple environment, the main tool being the
IDE. Although MonoTouch does not directly use the Xcode IDE, it can help you create a
simple app to deploy to a device. You can also use it to verify that the certifi cates and provi-
sioning information on the associated devices are working properly.
Interface Builder:
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Interface Builder (IB) allows for the graphical creation of a user interface.
The MonoDevelop IDE integrates with IB and converts the interface created within IB into a
user interface callable by MonoTouch.
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