One of the most important things professionals care about is the tools that are required to complete their work with. Just like carpenters need a chisel to scrape wood, or photographers need a camera to capture light, we developers need certain tools which we cannot work without.
In this chapter, we will provide information on what IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) and SDKs (Software Development Kits) are needed to develop applications for iOS, Apple's operating system, for the company's mobile devices. We will describe what the role of every tool in the development cycle is, and go through the features that are essential to develop our first application.
The following are the tools needed to develop applications with Xamarin.iOS:
An Apple Mac computer running at least the Lion (10.7.*) operating system: The essential programs we need cannot be installed on other computer platforms.
Note
Xamarin also offers Visual Studio development integration for their products. A Mac computer is still required for compiling, testing, debugging, and distributing the application. More information can be found on Xamarin's website at http://docs.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/introduction_to_xamarin_ios_for_visual_studio/.
Latest iOS SDK: To be able to download iOS SDK, a developer must be registered as an Apple developer. iOS SDK, among other things, includes two essential components:
Xcode: This is Apple's IDE for developing native applications for iOS and Mac with the Objective-C programming language.
iOS Simulator: This is an essential program to debug iOS apps on the computer, without the need of a device. Note that there are many iOS features that do not work on the simulator. Hence, a device is needed if an app uses these features.
Note
Both the registration and SDK download are free of charge from Apple's developer portal (http://developer.apple.com). If we want to run and debug our apps on the device or distribute them on the App Store, we need to enroll to iOS Developer Program, which requires a subscription fee.
Xamarin Installer: Xamarin offers all their necessary tools in one installation bundle. This bundle includes the Xamarin.iOS SDK and Xamarin Studio, the IDE for developing iOS applications with C#. A free registration is required for downloading the Xamarin Installer, and it can be found by clicking on the link http://xamarin.com/download.
This chapter will also describe how to create our first iPhone project with Xamarin Studio, construct its UI with Xcode, and access the app's user interface from within our code, with the concepts of Outlets and Actions.
Last, but not least, we will learn how to compile our app, the available compilation options we have, and how to debug on the simulator.