Idiomatic iPhone development for .net developers

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+1 Q:

Idiomatic iPhone development for .net developers

I was wondering if anyone had any links to some decent blogs helping developers to make a transition from C#/Asp.Net to iPhone development.

I'm really looking for something that will explain the mindset I need to be succesful using Cocoa Touch, Objective-c and Xcode, coming from a VS/C#/ASP.Net development platform. Sort of an hollistic comparison of Cocoa Touch and ASP.Net.

UPDATE

I know this might be a tricky question, but I want to learn to use Cocoa Touch the way it was meant to be used, rather than just learn Objective-c, or simply develop for the iPhone. I'm trying to broaden my horizons and mindset, not just slap the keyboard until make stuff work, zug.

The kinds of things I am looking for would be a comparison between the Webforms paradigm and the Cocoa Touch paradigm, without just saying "it's MVC".

+3 A:

I found the Objective-C Wikipedia page quite helpful for an introduction to the features of Objective-C which make it different from other programming languages, specifically contrasting it with C and C++. That page and its bibliography should give you plenty of resources for comparisons to other languages.

My OO background is mostly in C++ and C# and that page really helped me understand what was different about Objective-C and gave me some good idiomatic comparisons (which Apple is very bad at providing).

But for getting into the Cocoa/iPhone mindset, there really is no substitute for drinking the Apple koolaid and jumping headlong into their vast trove of programming guides, tutorials, and class documentation.

Victorb 2010-02-05 04:28:54

+1 Victor, thanks for sharing your experience. I'm probably more interested in how to go about designing and thinking about the design of iPhone apps, rather than just syntactic differences between, say, Objective-c and C#. I'll have a go at that wikipedia article though :).

Khanzor 2010-02-05 05:00:03

If you need a few starting points for common iPhone design paradigms, the key words you are going to want to research are MVC, KVO, lazy loading, delegates, and categories. Many of those have analogues in other environments.But of course, the granddaddy of all iPhone design concerns is UIKit, the touch interface, and the view controller/view hierarchy which you really have to dig into the iPhone SDK to understand properly.Good luck :)

Victorb 2010-02-05 08:21:46

+1 A:

I found this guide very helpful in understanding Objective-C:

http://pierre.chachatelier.fr/programmation/fichiers/cpp-objc-en.pdf

I came from the Java side of things, the document is titled "C++ to Objective-C" but has a number of Java examples which you should be able to understand easily, along with the equivalent Objective-C examples.

It's basically a rosetta stone of language features, written for people that already understand other languages well.

Kendall Helmstetter Gelner 2010-02-05 05:14:31

Thanks Kendall, I'm not really struggling with Objective-c, but more with just grokking the way to go about developing for the iPhone.

Khanzor 2010-02-06 09:50:31

A lot of people like the "Head First iPhone Programming" book. Another thing to consider is the APress "Advanced iPhone projects" book which may be more at a more advanced level that would get you up to speed quickly.

Kendall Helmstetter Gelner 2010-02-06 15:33:53

Mono Touch

Features:

Mono for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch
C# and .NET on the iPhone
.NET Bindings to Native APIs
Distribute on the Apple App Store
Enterprise deployable
MonoDevelop Integration
XCode Integration

QrystaL 2010-02-05 08:11:23

Thanks QrystaL, but I'm really looking for developing for the iPhone using Cocoa Touch, and not MonoTouch which I've already heard about. This is me also trying to broaden my horizons, so just doing the same old, same old won't really help.

Khanzor 2010-02-06 09:49:54

ansaurus

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Idiomatic iPhone development for .net developers

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