The ShinobiControls MonoTouch beta is
ready to download now.
A couple of days ago Jesse announced the
release of Shinobi v2.0.7 which gave our already lightning fast
charts an impressive boost in speed and also introduced the beta
release of our MonoTouch bindings. In this blog post I want to say
a bit more about our MonoTouch support and future developments in
this area.
The Mono framework has had a long history, having originally
been released in 2004 as an open source implementation of the
Microsoft .NET framework. The Mono framework covers many of the
core .NET frameworks (ASP.NET, WPF, WinForms), but more recently it
has extended its reach to mobile devices, providing an alternative
to HTML5 for cross platform mobile application development.
Released under the Xamarin banner
you can download the tools required to develop C# application for
iOS (MonoTouch) and Android (Mono for Android).
When I was at the WWDC12 conference a few weeks ago I attended
an event where I met with Miquel de Icaza (the founder of Xamarin),
the Xamarin team and a room full of enthusiastic MonoTouch
developers, many of whom are keen to move their existing .NET
products onto iOS as quickly as possible.
Whilst MonoTouch provides C# bindings for the Cocoa Touch
framework, if you want to use any other components within your
code, you have to generate your own C# bindings. Due to the
enthusiasm of the developers I met at WWDC, and the large volume of
email requests we have had from MonoTouch developers (some of whom
have created their own bindings), we have decided to add
first-class MonoTouch support to ShinobiControls.
So what exactly does this mean? We have been through the process
of generating bindings for our Objective-C APIs, replacing
delegates and datasources with their C# equivalents, making naming
convention changes and unit testing the resulting APIs. It's been a
lot of work, but we're very happy with the result (not least
myself, as someone who is still more at home with C# than
objective-C!). We've even gone the extra mile and generated
documentation for the C# bindings.
The MonoTouch bindings have been through a three week technical
preview release and are now ready for a public beta, and this is
where we want your help. If you are a MonoTouch developer,
please download a copy and let us know what you think. In the
near future we'll officially add MonoTouch bindings to our product
suite, we also plan to continue maintaining these bindings as we
release more components in the future.
We're very happy to welcome C# developers to
ShinobiControls!
Regards, Colin E.