Tag: xamarin

Xamarin and I Are Hella Busy Hacking This Week

This week, along with the normal duties of getting everything from SSL working to code slung for account management to intellectual property (what is that exactly 😮 )…  this week is going to get hella busy. Here’s a few of the public events and training that I’ll be attending this week along with the normal bike n’ hacking n’ gettin’ shit done.

Shared Code Projects, PCL and Xamarin on 7/8/14 @

Intel JFCC Auditorium
2111 N.E. 25th Ave
Hillsboro, OR

James Montemagno  from Xamarin is coming to learn us the deets on how to create common core code that can run on any or all common platforms. Find out the differences between shared code project, portable class libraries, and simple file linking to share more code on iOS, Android, and Windows. This should be pretty kick ass to help kick OrchestrateExecutive off the ground. There’s a little more info here for the event: http://www.padnug.org/.

Database Stuff that aint RDBMS on 7/10/14 @

I’ll @adron be presenting on database types, what’s available out there outside of the relational and RDBMS world. How to resolve various problems with alternate data solutions for better results, better performance and ways to leap around the hurdles that are sometimes faced with RDBMS use.  More info here: http://www.meetup.com/ssdevelopers/events/176032122/

Xamarin Hands-on-Lab/Hackathon on 7/12/14 @

Montgomery Park

Kelly White @mckhendry has put together a hands-on-lab and hackathon, just a few days later hosting a hand-on-lab working with Xamarin to build apps. I’m going to hit up this event too (then go ride a 100+ kilometer bike ride, anybody up for the ride, ping me?) and sling some code on OrchestrateExecutive. Also a little more info here for the event: http://www.padnug.org/.

There’s more, but these are the top few meets I’ll be attending over the next two weeks. Happy hacking!

Getting Started with Swift, For NON-Apple Devs

This past weekend I attempted to get started with Swift coding. Since I have not been an Apple Developer for a while, it wasn’t immediately obvious how to get started. But once I fumbled around a few minutes I realized I needed a developer account to get the latest XCode. Jeez, it really shows how much Apple loves to lock you in hard core to their development ecosystem. An unfortunate trait of a company that is actually extremely closed in much of its behavior, while taking advantage of so much of the open source community. But I digress, this isn’t a rant about the unethical behavior of Apple. I’ll reserve that for the novels worth of material it deserves.

One I signed up for the developer program, which costs $99 bucks, I immediately made my first huge mistake. This damnable mistake blew the entire weekend of hacking. I added under “Company” my simple DBA (Doing Business As) name. I already had an account, and because of this change for making this existing account become a developer account from a personal base level account, sprung a red flag. I checked back frequently over the weekend, but it wasn’t until Monday that somebody checked the app, realized the Company name I added was merely a DBA and ok’d my account. So far, 38 hours down the drain for getting started hacking on Swift! Dammit.

However, this morning I was happy to find everything was ok’d, and thus, the remaining bit of this blog entry is a bit more example and a little less story of my day.

Developer @ Apple
Developer @ Apple

Getting XCode 6 beta

I wanted to do Swift hacking, the first step was to download XCode 6 beta. That’s available via download on the iOS Developer page (and I suppose the Mac Developer page). Scroll down on that page until you find the XCode Download button.

The Warnings and the Download XCode 6 beta page.
The Warnings and the Download XCode 6 beta page.

Also note, if you’re looking to do Swift hacking like I’m doing here, I’d actually advise against getting the iOS 8 beta or OS-X Yosemite Developer Previews right now. Best to keep as stable a machine while toying around with a new language. At least, that’s what the conversations have been so far…

OS-X Yosemite & iOS 8
OS-X Yosemite & iOS 8

Once I got Xcode 6 beta installed I dove right into creating a Swift Project. I created a simple new project that is empty to just check out what Xcode 6 provides out of box for the Swift Project.

Selecting an empty Xcode 6 beta project to use with Swift.
Selecting an empty Xcode 6 beta project to use with Swift.

The next dialog is where the Swift magic is selected.

Selecting Swift, entering a project name and other information dialog.
Selecting Swift, entering a project name and other information dialog.

After that I just clicked through on defaults until I got into the Xcode IDE with the project open.

Selecting the appropriate simulator.
Selecting the appropriate simulator.

Next I executed the project. Since I’d had my phone attached it wanted to run it there, but I have 7.1 iOS on it which won’t execute Swift code. I had to select the appropriate simulator then to run the application project. Once that ran, since I’d not done so on this particular computer, I needed to enable developer mode.

Enabling developer mode.
Enabling developer mode.

I did so and the empty application launched.

An empty iOS 8 iPad Retina Application.
An empty iOS 8 iPad Retina Application.

So that’s the basic getting started, no code actually slung. But rest assured I’ll have another post soon detailing some first code snippets. I also hope to get some comparisons written up between XCode with Swift and Xamarin Studio and C#. It’s cool that Apple finally has a modern feature rich language, so it’ll be interesting to see how each stacks up from a language and IDE perspective.

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