ConceptDev (Craig Dunn's blog)

Xamarin welcomes MonoTouch and MonoDroid "home"

2011-07-18T23:07:00.002+10:00

Great news! Xamarin has acquired a "broad, perpetual license" to the MonoTouch and Mono-for-Android work that was done while the dev team was part of Novell (prior to the Attachmate buyout kerfuffle). There's a press release on the Novell website and Miguel posted on his blog too. Congratulations to the Xamarin team!

Check out the product details at:

Xamarin home
MonoTouch (for iOS)
Mono-for-Android (for Android:)
plus the store & bugzilla are back... and the products are available to purchase immediately (with upgrades for 'existing customers')

Start with the iOS Roadmap to find out what's coming up next.

Monospace is going to be great! Have you downloaded the app yet :-) ?

"M"osetta Stone II: ViewController → Activity

2011-07-13T22:29:00.002+10:00

After my recent posts I received a question asking for tips on porting a MonoTouch app to MonoDroid. I'm going to take a crack at that over a couple of days - with the warning that you probably shouldn't rush out and buy either tool but wait for Xamarin's future Mono-on-iOS and Mono-on-Android products.

The purpose of the original "M"osetta Stone post was to give cross-platform developers a 'head start' with some high-level concepts. This post will look a little closer at a screen from the Monospace11 app: the Speakers list.

This may be a massive oversimplification, but...

if you have ___ in iOS	then you want ___ in Android	to
UIViewController	Activity	subclass to present a screen/form/page to the user
ViewDidLoad()	OnCreate()	setup the UI
Add() or AddSubview()	SetContentView()	use in ViewDidLoad/OnCreate to 'attach' UI to display
ViewWillAppear()	OnResume()	load/re-load data that might change and bind to UI
UITableView	ListView	visual control that presents a scrolling list
UITableViewSource	Adapter	subclass to broker the display of a data collection to the UI
GetCell()	GetView()	to build the layout(UI) for each cell/row, including re-using cells/views for performance
RowSelected()	ItemClick EventHandler	perform an action when a row is touched
RowsInSection	Count	tell the table/list how many rows to cater for

Here's how it looks in a Visual Studio Class Diagram*

* I've greyed out some of the methods not relevant to the discussion - the iOS implementation of the alphabetic index down the right edge doesn't have an Android equivalent, for example

Notes:

UITableViewSource has been implemented as an nested class to resemble the iOS pattern of implementing the equivalent Obj-C protocols on the ViewController - this pattern makes no sense in Android so the classes are separate.
The MonoTouch example code builds the UI in C# (eg. tableView=new UITableView();AddSubview (tableView);) whereas MonoDroid loads layout XML files SetContentView(Resource.Layout.Speakers);. This can happen in both ViewDidLoad/OnCreate and GetCell/GetView where UI controls must be created and presented to the user.
The 'touch event handler' is in a different class: in MonoTouch the TableViewSource handles a touch for a specific row (NSIndexPath); MonoDroid implements the ItemClick EventHandler<ItemEventArgs> on the ListView for a given GetRow(e.Position).
Both examples use the constructor (TableViewSource/SpeakersAdapter) of the 'broker' class to pass the actual business object collection for display. This pattern lets the data be filtered/sorted/whatever before being passed in for display.
Calling refreshSpeakers() from ViewDidLoad/OnResume is kinda redundant in this example since the list never changes - but in other spots (eg the Favorites screen) you would want to refresh the list each time because it may have changed.

The Code
You can have a look at the MonoTouch code SpeakersViewController.cs and the MonoDroid SpeakersActivity.cs, SpeakersAdapter.cs to see the actual implementation. For MonoDroid you'll also need to check out the layout XML files Speakers.axml and SpeakersItem.axml.

One more thing...
One final piece which takes some getting used to... in MonoTouch this screen is part of a UINavigationController stack and your RowSelected creates a new ViewController object (passing whatever parameters you need) and calls NavigationController.PushViewController(). The ViewController instances in the navigation stack are 'stateful' and it is really easy to pass business objects around as parameters.
In MonoDroid, the ever-present 'back-stack' does not require a specific 'navigation controller' BUT at it's simplest the mechanism is much more primative and involves passing simple type parameters (eg. strings) like this

var intent = new Intent();
intent.SetClass(this, typeof(SpeakerActivity));
intent.PutExtra("Name", speaker.Name);
StartActivity(intent);

There are more sophisticated approaches but it is probably best to keep your parameter-passing to a minimum - this way the Android hardware 'Back' button "just works".

HTH Slava ;-)

MonoDroid v MonoTouch : a comparison

2011-07-11T22:24:00.001+10:00

The past few days I've posted MonoDroid and MonoTouch apps for Monospace - and while they aren't perfect examples of the sort of code-sharing and efficiency that's possible with Mono I thought it would be interesting to compare them as the functionality they offer is very similar.

First, these are the high-level code metrics (as calculated by Visual Studio):

Unfortunately I didn't align the namespaces very well. Here's the explanation:

Total lines of code (TLOC)
Mono-for-Android: 802 lines
MonoTouch: 1,420 lines (2,033 - 613 in SQLite)
At first glance, the MonoDroid app 'wins' with just half the code of the MonoTouch version. I've ignored the SQLite library and the MonoTouch.Dialog framework as they aren't "user code", and any non-.cs files (eg XML markup).

Common code
Although difficult to 'see' because I've rushed these codebases into the public domain, there is a bit of 'code re-use' in these apps (ie. it was only written once, and the c# shared across both platforms using the power of Mono :)
ConfXml == MIX10Xml == approx 200 lines of business objects (DTOs mainly) that match the serialized conf.xml format that is the shared data structure for both platforms.

The ConceptDevelopment.Kelvin code is also shared (different sizes in each aren't relevant for now).

Removing the common code from the comparison results in these totals:
Mono-for-Android: 575 lines (802-199-28)
MonoTouch: 1,145 lines (1,420-178-97)

"Re-used" code
Mono-for-Android's Main.cs::DeserializeConferenceFile, LoadWhatsOn and MonoTouch's AppDelegate.cs::FinishedLaunching both contain "very similar" code in the form of the conf.xml deserializer and parser. In MonoTouch it's 70 lines and in MonoDroid it's 307 lines. The MonoTouch version is heavily assisted by the Linq/MonoTouch.Dialog code in HomeController (another 150 lines or so) which explains part of the difference... but what is shared is the deserialization logic and a number of Linq statements that help parse it for display. These would be harded to shift into a common library due to the dependency on MonoTouch.Dialog - but there was definitely an efficiency gain by having the code already written and tested on one platform before porting to the other. I'll adjust both by the same 'average' LOC count to try and reflect the 'copy/paste but modify' efficiency gain.

Mono-for-Android: 375 lines (575-200)
MonoTouch: 945 lines (1,145-200)

Feature parity
Adjust the MonoTouch solution to allow for the fact that it implements the Map feature that is not available on MonoDroid - 118 lines of code across a few classes.
MonoTouch: 827 lines (945-118)

What's left?
Once we've removed the libraries, the shared data structure, common code and allowed for some "copy/paste re-use", what's left to differentiate the two codebases? Basically just the UI and the code that binds our DTOs to it.

	Mono-for-Android	MonoTouch (iOS)
Code	375 lines	827 lines
'markup'	14 AXML	1 XIB
Views	7 Activities	9 ViewControllers
DataSources	6 Adapters	5 TableViewSource

Some notes on the difference:

There are 350 lines of AXML to define the layouts used in MonoDroid - the equivalent task in MonoTouch is done mostly in C#, significantly contributing to the LOC difference. I could have implemented a lot of that MonoTouch layout in XIBs using InterfaceBuilder - I just don't like doing it that way.
The UITabBarController takes more code to setup than
OnCreateOptionsMenu.
The iOS SQLite implementation of saving Favorites is more verbose than the XML-serialized-file solution used on Android.
The MonoTouch source is almost 2 years old, and in some places isn't as succinct as it could be.

Conclusion
So is MonoTouch instrinsically more verbose than MonoDroid? I don't think so - it depends greatly on your preference for constructing your Views (XIBs or in-code). The more important question: does building with Mono* make it easier to port your app to other mobile platforms... and the answer is YES! In future this code might get tidied up into a good example of a cross-platform app... in that case I'll re-examine the stats to make an even better case.

Look at it this way: the iOS app took 1,400 lines of code (it was written first). For an additional 375 LOC (plus some layout XML) we got an Android port - almost for free!

Thankfully it sounds like Xamarin Studio is coming along nicely.

MonoTouch for Monospace II

2011-07-09T20:55:00.000+10:00

Further to the MonoDroid version, I've just submitted an iOS version of the Monospace 2011 conference app to Apple (fingers crossed it gets approved, and in time for the conference!).

Here's how it looks:

Even if it doesn't get approved in time, the code is open-source and can be found at github.com/conceptdev/Monospace11. It is based on the original Monospace09, PDC09 and MIX10 apps. A couple of guys helped out with the MIX10 version: @migueldeicaza, @kangamono and @chrisntr. I know Miguel in particular was keen for this code to be open-sourced... I think (?) it was one of the first outings of his awesome MonoTouch.Dialog library. I'd like to thank them again for their help (and to note that any remaining bugs or problems are mine). Also note: there is some old code in there (like, almost 2 years)... it scares me a little to put it up on Github, so please, be gentle.

I'll update with an AppStore link if/when Apple is done; but for now just enjoy the code :)

See you at Monospace!

MonoDroid for Monospace

2011-07-06T21:57:00.002+10:00

Waay back in 2009 I threw together MonoTouch for Monospace as an early example of using C# on the iPhone using MonoTouch.

Fast-forward two years... to MonoDroid for Monospace:

The schedule for Monospace 2011 was just announced today, and since there didn't seem to be a mobile app announced along with it I've re-used some old code to get a basic Android app working using Mono for Android.

Download/try it out
You can install Monospace11 from the Android Market

OR

Download the Mono for Android code from Monospace11 on Github

and visit the 'homepage' at monospace11.confapp.com

Leave any comments or feedback below.

OzALT.NET MonoDroid Presentation

2011-05-31T21:13:00.000+10:00

Slides from tonight's OzALT.NET '20 minute' presentation on Mono-for-Android. I didn't actually make it through all the slides, but we got through a few demos including this simple HelloWorldActivity.cs example and the Restaurant Guide demo.

OzAltNet Fast-ANDroid-Furious

Also enjoyed @thomasjo's pres on CoffeeScript and Joshua Roth talking about NBuilder.

Mobile UI Design ramblings...

2011-05-28T14:17:00.003+10:00

Mobile UI design has come up a couple of times the past few days (as has Xamarin),

I'm looking to port an existing iOS app to Android - how 'same' should it look?
Nielsen Norman Group released their latest Useability of iPad Apps and Websites report
Ongoing discussion with @russaus

...so seemed like a good time to make some notes (and for UI, read UX and IA as well :)

Porting apps...
Porting apps from one platform to another (iPhone to Android, iPad to Android, or to Windows Phone, or from 'web', etc) always brings with it a challenge to make each version feel 'native' and embrace the platform's UI idioms & metaphors (while simultaneously re-using as much code as possible and keeping your application consistent across each). This can be seen in previous posts on the MIX11 app and the Restaurant Guide sample being ported to iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7. Should the new Android app be a 'UI clone' of the iOS version? Should it be redesigned from scratch, removing any traces of iOS-ness? The answer is probably somewhere in between, being guided by your usability and branding goals, and by feedback from your users.
UPDATE: some thoughts on Why Are Android Apps Ugly? :-)

"Usability of iPad Apps and Websites": 2 reports
Coincidentally, while planning the UI for the Android app, Nielson Norman Group released an updated Usability Report for iPad Apps and Websites. The new edition (and the previous) are great reads (free to download) - some points will seem obvious, some will trigger "a-ha" moments and other's you'll disagree with; but overall you'll probably find it worthwhile to download them both.

References...
There are a couple of great websites worth looking at when you are doing UI design

mobile-patterns.com is a cool collection of screenshots from iPhone apps grouped into 'UX categories' like User Profiles and Lists. My favorite is Empty Data Sets - so often overlooked! (by @mari18)
ui-patterns.com is a more general collection (ie. not mobile) with categories like Getting Input and Navigation. It is a LOT deeper in terms of content (articles/discussion as well as screenshots) and likely to be thought-provoking no matter what platform you're working on. (follow @uipatternscom
UPDATE: Windows Phone 7 for Designers — Cheat Sheet kinda similar to the mobile-patterns site above but for Windows Phone. Poster-layout for easy printing/reference (by @teppo).

...and what about that whole MonoTouch/MonoDroid 'thing'?
Novell (Attachmate) says (my underline)

Focusing on what matters most to customers is the key to our innovation strategy and will drive the growth of our business. This has meant reductions in certain areas, such as Mono. However, Mono remains part of the SUSE business and should customer demand for Mono products accelerate, our development efforts will rapidly respond. Regardless, we will continue to provide maintenance and support for all Mono products – MonoTouch, Mono for Android, Mono Tools for Visual Studio and SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension.

But it sounds disingenuous considering they have already sacked the entire team... and WTF does "should...demand...accelerate" mean? How is demand going to grow when they've killed any chance of enhancing the product and do not market it?? If they were truly "Focusing on what matters most to customers" they wouldn't have sacked the engineers in the first place, or else should have released/sold/transferred the Touch/Droid IP to Xamarin where it has some hope of a future (IMHO, anyway). </2centsworth>

Also, in related news, @migueldeicaza announced that Nat Friedman has joined Xamarin as CEO. Nat previously worked with Miguel as a co-founder of Ximian.

p.s. I'm *guessing* that we will be saying goodbye to the MonoTouch and Mono for Android product names since Novell probably owns them... wondering what I should use for Twitter hashtags now to replace #monotouch and #monodroid? Something with an 'X'? :)

MonoTouch/MonoDroid and Xamarin - what now?

2011-05-17T22:46:00.000+10:00

If you are in the mono community then you'd have to be living under a rock not to have read that Novell was purchased by Attachmate then (first) heard the rumors that Attachmate Lets US Mono Developers Go and (second) seen Miguel's confirmation/announcement of the creation of Xamarin.

What I think this means is:

Mono should be fine. It has always been open-source (see github.com/mono) and receives contributions from a variety or people regardless of who they work for.
The MonoTouch and Mono for Android (aka MonoDroid) products published by Novell will effectively stop being supported "as of now". This is based on the fact that none of the devs work there any more.
Attachmate hasn't announced any plans for those products - even whether they'll continue to be available for sale (along with the associated activation servers). It's impossible to predict what will happen here... various people are trying to get answers from Novell/Attachmate. Personally, even if Attachmate attempted to continue selling/supporting the products I would choose not to be their customer as soon as alternatives are available.
Miguel and the team who built MonoTouch and MonoDroid have publicly announced they're working on comparable/compatible products to be sold by Xamarin (their new company). These new products are 3-4 months away, betas first prior to a real release. They've done it before, they can do it again!

Lots of people (myself included) have invested plenty of time and money purchasing, learning and using MonoTouch and MonoDroid. I even helped write a MonoTouch book (and some guys have been busy with a MonoDroid one too). We are all collectively upset, disappointed and angry (imagine how the devs themselves feel).

All of this uncertainty has provoked a number of reactions, among them suggestions that all the work done on MonoTouch/MonoDroid projects to-date has been wasted or that people should start learning the native SDKs for iOS and Android instead of committing to the Mono alternatives.

Learning the native SDKs has always been an option for anyone interested in mobile dev, but who wants to go to all that effort!? The value proposition for Mono* remains: .NET developers can leverage their existing language and framework knowledge AND code can be written once and re-used across three platforms (iOS, Android and Windows Phone). Those advantages continue to be true - the two products are definitely useable right now (MonoTouch obviously more mature than MonoDroid) - and if you care to take Miguel at his word they have a 'compatible' future. So what to do in the next 3 or 4 months...

I already have a MonoTouch/MonoDroid app written and published (or almost published)
Keep going! If everything is working for you right now, why change? In future you "might" need to port your work to native IF Xamarin's products are late/don't work. But if you start porting now and spend three months doing the conversion and Xamarin succeeds then you'll have wasted a lot of effort! What's more, your existing codebase will form an excellent 'regression test' for the Xamarin previews/betas... make sure you sign up at xamarin.com and participate! Your knowledge and experience with the existing products will be very helpful testing the new bits.

If you are really pessimistic you can still continue on this path - but maybe allocate some of your dev time learning the native SDKs and possibly prototype/porting some of your code. Don't do all of it - just get comfortable with the fact that it's possible while waiting to see how Xamarin develops.

I have purchased MonoTouch/MonoDroid and was planning to use them in future
Why not give them a try anyway? There are multiple benefits of using Mono*, including learning the native SDK APIs from the comfort of a language you know and also being productive more quickly. Think of it like prototyping - you get something working quickly and along the way learn a lot that can be re-used (you WILL learn the iOS/Android APIs).

If your app is single-platform I can imagine this decision might be a close call (and perhaps you should just learn Objective-C or Java) BUT if you are planning a cross-platform solution then you are still going to save time and effort with Mono* and code-sharing. One obvious risk would be the possibility of hitting something that isn't supported/doesn't work in Mono* yet - so do your research.

On the other hand, imagine spending the next few months learning BOTH Objective-C and Java, and producing two incompatible codebases for your app, only to discover that Xamarin rocks!

I'm a consultant and I've recommended MonoTouch/MonoDroid to clients
Ouch. This is bound to 'look bad' since the less your clients understand about the risk/reward of a tool like Mono*, the more they are going think you've stuffed up. In reality, though, the above points still apply - you can offer them the same bet: switch tools now and potentially waste some time or risk 'maybe' porting at a later time but take advantage of the benefits Mono* provides now... after all you recommended Mono* for a reason and many of those reasons are still valid.

I have done this myself - so I know how uncomfortable it feels.

I am interested in MonoTouch or MonoDroid but haven't purchased yet
This is a tough one. I'm not sure that the Novell Shopping Cart or the Activation Server are even working at the moment (activation behind an authenticating proxy is not supported at all). Even if they were, I'm not sure I'd want to give Attachmate my money. Maybe this will become clearer in the coming days/weeks.
You can definitely try out the 'free trial' (emulator only) editions but for a real project that you want to publish on AppStore/Marketplace soon I'm afraid you might need to consider learning the native SDKs or waiting a while... :-(

In conclusion...
I'll be the first to admit this is a very "glass half-full" point-of-view. Lots of bad s**t could happen: support issues with the current products that can't be resolved, legal issues with Attachmate, product delays from Xamarin, unexpected costs or incompatibilities for the new stuff, etc, etc, etc.

At the end of the day, you'll make a decision based on your risk-averse-ness (triple word score!) regardless of my rainbows and unicorns. Just keep in mind that the apparent 'end of life' of the current MonoTouch/MonoDroid products, while sad, is not (yet) the end of the world. In some ways, you can best support Xamarin by continuing to use the existing tools so that you've got something to migrate to their new stuff.

Make sure you've got some peanuts and a towel, and above all DON'T PANIC.

Mobile Camp Oz

2011-05-07T20:56:00.000+10:00

Went along to Mobile Camp Oz today, saw some great presentations from @dglover, Scott Vandonkelaar and @markaufflick as well as an interesting keynote by Darren Burden of Fairfax Media. Thanks to the speakers for their time and also to everyone that came along to watch (finally special thanks to Nick for organising and convincing me to come along!).

As for my pres, here are the slides:

Cross-platform mobile dev with Mono

and you'll find example source at github.com/conceptdev. The pres was a bit slide-heavy... will do more live-code/examples next time.

Also check out these past posts:

Finally - check out the result of Scott's presentation on the Android Market Mobile Camp Oz!

MIX11... the mobile app collection

2011-04-11T20:42:00.012+10:00

It's that time of year again - MIX11 conference time - and although last year there was just one mobile app (MIX10 for iPhone), this year conference delegates are spoilt for choice!

This year there are Conf-powered apps on the three biggest mobile platforms: iPhone, Windows Phone 7 and Android...

All are pure .NET projects - the Windows Phone 7 app uses the Microsoft Windows Phone SDK while the iOS and Android versions are bought to you via power of Mono: MonoTouch and Mono for Android

The official 'site' for these apps is mix11.confapp.com - it also lists a couple of 'other' options for Windows Phone users. Download one or all of them - and have a great time at MIX!

Aside: for those working on cross-mobile-platform UI, the primary navigation mechanism is quite different across the three platforms (my thoughts):

iOS uses a 'tab bar', familiar to all users as it features in most iOS apps. The benefits are that it's always visible and the icon appearance is consistent and attractive. Only five options fit before they get hidden behind a 'More...' link.
Windows Phone 7 uses the 'panorama' control. While it encourages discovery by panning across pages, not all options are immediately obvious to the user. Microsoft suggests a maximum of seven pages, so beyond that limit you need to think of other navigation paths.
Android uses the operating-system provided 'hardware menu'; it is not visible until the user presses the button however it can then display a number of options at once (similar to iOS). Because it can be context-sensitive the user doesn't really know what options to expect until they press the button (although the MIX11 app uses a consistent menu from all pages to get around this confusion).

"M"osetta Stone

2011-03-06T13:12:00.002+11:00

Some more thoughts on cross-platform mobile development (MonoTouch, MonoDroid and Windows Phone 7) from yesterday's post - a 'rosetta stone' (not this one) to translate between the three platforms (Not that each of these things is exactly equivalent - they're matched up where the concept/role/function seems similar to me).

	iOS	WP7	Android
"View"	XIB (Interface Builder)	Xaml	axml
	UIViewController	PhoneApplicationPage (codebehind)	Activity
	n/a (UIAutoResizing)	StackPanel	LinearLayout
	UITableView	ListBox	ListView
	UITableViewCell	ListBox.ItemTemplate	n/a (any view)
	UITableViewSource	n/a (binding, IEnumerable)	BaseAdapter
Navigation "Controller"	NavigationController. PushViewController()	NavigationService. Navigate()	StartActivity()
	n/a (object)	Xaml Uri	Intent.SetClass()
	n/a (object properties)	Xaml Uri querystring params	Intent.PutExtra() .AddFlags()
	n/a (object properties)	NavigationContext .QueryString .TryGetValue()	Intent .GetXXXExtra()
Threading	InvokeOnMainThread	Dispatcher.BeginInvoke	RunOnUiThread
"Model"	C# .NET objects - shared thanks to Mono on iOS & Android. Also `WebClient`, `Linq`, `Generics`, `Xml`, `Serialization`, etc... :-)

One major difference between iOS and the other two (both in terms of coding and also UI design) is the presence of hardware buttons and the back-stack.

Hardware buttons
The most important hardware button is Back (covered next) however Android's Menu button is also significant for the impact is has on UI design compared to iOS and WP7. Both Apple and Microsoft's designers like the application menu (UITabBarController, ApplicationBar) to be permanently visible. Google, on the other hand, provides the Menu button to show the menu, meaning that most of the time it is hidden. This means your Android app UI might need to provide other visual clues so that navigation/features/options are more discoverable.

Back stack
Both Android and WindowsPhone7 devices have a hardware Back button supported by the respective SDKs via the 'back-stack' which is analogous to your web-browser History: each "View" has an "address" (a Xaml Uri in WP7, an Intent in Android) which is stored as the user navigates through your application. At any time (unless you intercept it) the hardware Back button allows the user to cycle back through previous views until they have exited your app.

iOS utilises a similar navigation metaphor in its UINavigationController - however the back button is 'soft' (displayed in the top-left corner of the screen) and the scope is limited to the set of views that the developer chose to include in that navigation context.

MonoDroid meet MonoTouch & WindowsPhone7

2011-03-05T21:33:00.002+11:00

This post follows the previous one about building for MonoTouch and WindowsPhone7 by porting the example to Google's Android platform using MonoDroid.

Here's how it looks (no need to identify which platform is which :)

As before, the code is available on github/conceptdev/RestaurantGuide - for comparison here is a shot of the three .sln files.

A couple of observations:

One of the reasons the iOS/MonoTouch solution is so 'neat' is because I have not used the 'UI Designer' for that platform (ie. Interface Builder) so there are no 'markup' files for the user interface (ie. .xib files). The entire layout is done in C# for the MonoTouch example, whereas the WP7 and Android version use Xaml and axml respectively.
These examples 'just work' - they don't claim to be best-practice in designing an app for any of these platforms*.

* for a quite neat cross-platform design (at least across MonoDroid and WP7) see @gshackles TwitterSearcher sample

p.s. does anyone know what the Android equivalent of an "indexed list" is? Pls comment or @conceptdev... thx

Random tip: wtf is"7 CDCs" and debugging on a Samsung Galaxy Tab

2011-02-28T10:07:00.000+11:00

Just a quick note on some issues I had debugging a MonoDroid app I've been playing with (MonoDroid is very cool, BTW)... for some reason I couldn't get a Samsumg Galaxy Tab to be recognised as a USB device when connected to my 64-bit Windows 7 PC.

Googling turned up a few different 'ideas' like Samsung Galaxy S Problems, Samsung Kies Software and PC connectivity and Connect Samsung Galaxy S with Kies on your PC - The MTP Error. None of those suggestions worked for me, despite a lot of mucking about with driver installs.

It turned out a hint in this post on USB connection trouble fixed my problem... "somehow" the device's USB port was set to 'modem mode' and I had to type *#7284# on the phone keypad to re-set it! Un-in-tuitive!

The Kies Samsung software/drivers off the Samsung website were fine, once the device was in 'USB mode'.

Anyway, hope that helps someone else...

Status Update: accessing Facebook with MonoTouch

2011-02-18T21:43:00.001+11:00

Haven't blogged for a while, but hopefully that's about to change... and to kick off more regular posts here is a simple example of accessing the Facebook OpenGraph API using MonoTouch.

The core of the example is @redth's MonoTouch.Facebook.Authorization ViewController which uses the Facebook OAuth webpage hosted in a UIWebView to authenticate and grab the access_token you need for subsequent requests.

The app looks like this when it runs (and yes, when you Save your status update, it appears directly on your Facebook Profile):

The code is available on github at github.com/conceptdev/Facebook - remember you need to have a Facebook Application 'Client ID' (create one here) to get it working. NOTE: this is a sample - there is very little in the way of error detection, correction or recovery... left as an exercise for the reader :)

Facebook Login
The Facebook OAuth 'magic' happens inside a UIWebView... we create one and navigate to https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize which displays and processes the login form. A successful authentication results in a redirect to a 'known page'; the redirected URL contains the access_token needed for subsequent 'authorised' requests so the code strips it out and saves it. Thanks again to Jon without whom the rest of the code wouldn't be here!

Facebook Newsfeed
Getting the news feed is relatively simple and thanks to some useful info on using Json.NET with MonoTouch it is easy to parse too!

var b = wc.DownloadData(
   new Uri("https://graph.facebook.com/me/home?access_token=" + token));
var s = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(b);
var posts = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Posts>(s);

The parsing works so easily because Objects.cs contains a set of classes that (roughly, not completely) match the JSON returned by Facebook, for example:

{"data":[\{"id":"57755305836_10150135900140837","from":\{"name":"Tiga","category":"Musician\\/band","id":"57755305836"\},
"message":"Bad DJ Signs Vol.1:  when your dancefloor reminds you of the \\"club\\" scene from \\"Vanilla Sky\\"",
"icon":"http:\\/\\/photos-d.ak.fbcdn.net\\/photos-ak-snc1\\/v27562\\/23\\/2231777543\\/app_2_2231777543_9553.gif",
"actions":[\{"name":"Comment","link":"http:\\/\\/www.facebook.com\\/57755305836\\/posts\\/10150135900140837"\},
\{"name":"Like","link":"http:\\/\\/www.facebook.com\\/57755305836\\/posts\\/10150135900140837"\},
\{"name":"\\u0040ciaotiga on Twitter","link":"http:\\/\\/twitter.com\\/ciaotiga?"\}],
"type":"status","created_time":"2011-02-18T07:23:42+0000","updated_time":"2011-02-18T08:25:22+0000",
"likes":33

maps to

The DeserializeObject() call is then all that is required to take the JSON string and turn it into an object graph that is easily bound to a UITableView (see Main.cs).

Facebook Status Update
Once we have the authentication token updating your status is easy - a simple POST using WebClient is all it takes.

System.Net.WebClient wc = new System.Net.WebClient();
var result = wc.UploadString
("https://graph.facebook.com/me/feed?access_token=" + token
, "message=" + status);

but isn't there a Facebook API for iOS?
Yes, in addition to this 'manual' way of authenticating using an embedded webpage Facebook also provides a Mobile API. The UI presented to the user looks nicer than the webpage AND it can interact with the official Facebook app (if installed). To get that working with MonoTouch requires btouch-library bindings... but that's a story for another post.

UPDATE: (from comments below) @klmcmahon has already ported the Facebook iOS SDK and sample to MonoTouch - thanks Kevin!

Conf mobile schedule for TechEd Berlin & Øredev

2010-11-08T07:57:00.002+11:00

Europe is awash with conference attendees this week - for TechEd Berlin and Øredev.

If you are attending either conference, you might want to download Conf to your iPhone or Windows Phone 7 (no Android for now, but coming...).

One warning for Øredev - the 'unusual' session starting times (eg. 10 after the hour) were not catered for in the code, so the "up next" algorithm doesn't really work. To be fixed in the next release!

Hopefully no such issues occur with the TechEd Europe schedule, bought to you by the power of OData!

If you're reading this, you must be interested in these conferences, so you probably want to know about these other mobile schedule apps too*:

TEE2010 for iPhone and iPod Touch
Event Board for Windows Phone 7

* DISCLAIMER: I had nothing to do with either of these apps - just mentioning them FYI...

Conf for PDC10 on Windows Phone 7

2010-10-26T21:57:00.003+11:00

A first-cut of the PDC10 schedule can now be downloaded for the Windows Phone 7 version of Conf - now available on Marketplace (Zune link).

To download new conference data in Conf

Start on the first panel of the Panorama
Scroll down to other conferences... and touch Download more...
When the list downloads from the server, touch PDC10
PDC10 should appear in the list - if not, switch between the conferences until it does :-s

This is what the app looks like with PDC10 data loaded:

The iPhone version of Conf is currently awaiting AppStore approval - fingers crossed for Thursday!

MonoTouch & WindowsPhone7: indexed lists

2010-10-14T20:21:00.000+11:00

One interesting aspect of building cross-platform apps is how to adopt the 'standard' UI elements so that each app looks 'native'. A basic iPhone/MonoTouch and WindowsPhone7 application was introduced in a previous post. Each app uses the 'default' list representation.

This post is about making those apps easier to use, adding each platform's default "list index" to help select from long, sorted lists. The images below hardly need captions:

on the left is the iPhone app with alphabetic index down the right side of the screen
on the right is the WindowsPhone7 app showing the alphabet tiles 'in' the list, and the grid that is displayed when you touch one of those tiles

Implementing the two different solutions highlights the difference in the two platforms (referring of course to C#/MonoTouch on the iPhone, and C#/Silverlight on the WindowsPhone7). Get the complete code from github - the main changes for each platform are highlighted below:

iPhone (MonoTouch) UITableView sections

The following code was added to the UITableViewSource subclass to break up the list into sections, identify the section labels and wire up the alphabetic navigation. The GetCell and RowSelected methods also required a minor change.

List<string> sectionTitles;
Dictionary<int, <restaurant>> sectionElements = new Dictionary<int,restaurant>>();
public TableViewSource (List<restaurant> list, MainViewController controller)
{
   this.list = list;
   mvc = controller;
   sectionTitles = (from r in list
            orderby r.StartsWith
            select r.StartsWith).Distinct().ToList();
   foreach (var restaurant in list)
   {   // group elements together into 'alphabet'
      int sectionNumber = sectionTitles.IndexOf(restaurant.Name[0].ToString());
      if (sectionElements.ContainsKey(sectionNumber))
         sectionElements[sectionNumber].Add(restaurant);
      else
         sectionElements.Add(sectionNumber, new List<restaurant> {restaurant});
   }
}
public override int NumberOfSections (UITableView tableView)
{
   return sectionTitles.Count;
}
public override string TitleForHeader (UITableView tableView, int section)
{
   return sectionTitles[section];
}
public override string[] SectionIndexTitles (UITableView tableView)
{
   return sectionTitles.ToArray();
}
public override int RowsInSection (UITableView tableview, int section)
{
   return sectionElements[section].Count(); //list.Count;
}

Windows Phone 7 'quick jump grid'

Although you'll see this kind of navigation in the 'built-in' applications, it isn't actually part of the default SDK. Thankfully Kevin Marshall has posted a quick jump grid sample which has been integrated into the RestGuide app - just add the relevant Assembly References then update the XAML to use the QuickJumpGrid (don't forget to add the relevant xmlns: declarations)

<cc:QuickJumpGrid DataSource="{Binding}"
      IsAlphaNumeric="True"
      Margin="12,0,0,0"
      SelectionChanged="MainListBox_SelectionChanged"
      x:Name="MainListBox"
      OverlayTileBackground="#8CBF26">
    <cc:QuickJumpGrid.QuickJumpGridSelector>
        <local:RestaurantNameSelector />
    </cc:QuickJumpGrid.QuickJumpGridSelector>
    <cc:QuickJumpGrid.ItemTemplate>
        <DataTemplate>
           <StackPanel Margin="0,0,0,17" Width="432">
               <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextExtraLargeStyle}"/>
               <TextBlock Text="{Binding Cuisine}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Margin="12,-6,12,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextSubtleStyle}"/>
           </StackPanel>
        </DataTemplate>
    </cc:QuickJumpGrid.ItemTemplate>
</cc:QuickJumpGrid>

and implement this 'helper' class (which is referenced from the XAML)

namespace RestGuide
{
    public class RestaurantNameSelector : IQuickJumpGridSelector
    {
        public Func<object, IComparable> GetGroupBySelector()
        {
            return (p) => ((Restaurant)p).Name.FirstOrDefault();
        }
        public Func<object, string> GetOrderByKeySelector()
        {
            return (p) => ((Restaurant)p).Name;
        }
        public Func<object, string> GetThenByKeySelector()
        {
            return (p) => (string.Empty);
        }
    }
}

MonoTouch... CATiledLayer example (like DeepZoom/multi-scale-image)

2010-09-30T20:39:00.003+10:00

UPDATE 2-Oct-02: Thanks to Miguel's assistance the NPhotoScroller code on github is now working!

The CORRECT port of this Objective-C snippet...

+ (Class)layerClass {
  return [CATiledLayer class]; 
}

...is this c# (requires using MonoTouch.ObjCRuntime;)

[Export ("layerClass")]
public static Class LayerClass () {
  return new Class (typeof (CATiledLayer));
}

and not the dodgy hack I came up with below...

Original Post:
Normally code posted on this blog actually works (or close to it...) but today I have a half-done port of an Objective-C sample that I just can't seem to finish off :-(

The idea was to port Apple's PhotoScroller sample, which demonstrates how to use the CATiledLayer, to MonoTouch.

The work-in-progress is on github: NPhotoScroller*... however it isn't quite finished and I'm hoping someone will point out what is missing.

If you download the sample (and grab the images from Apple), the my MonoTouch port looks like this:

It seems to be working, since the image is being successfully drawn using tiles BUT there are too many tiles for this zoom level. It should look like the image below (ie. 4 tiles) but I can only get that effect by hardcoding TilingView.cs::line 96 to a specific zoom level of 0.125

Using a different hardcoded zoom level of 0.25 results in this output, so the tiles are 'definitely kinda working'...

The problem? Zooming is totally broken - any attempt to pinch/zoom on these images breaks. TilingView.cs::line 95 ALWAYS returns a scale of 1 - it never changes. ImageScrollView.cs::line 157 this.ZoomScale = this.MinimumZoomScale seems to have no effect: no matter what the MinimumZoomScale is (eg. 0.08), ZoomScale is always 1 and the context.GetCTM() CGAffineTransform never reflects a change in zoom level.

If you switch from 'tiled' to 'whole' images (PhotoViewController.cs::line 63 useTiledImage = false;) then zooming works perfectly (if greedily from a memory perspective). I would love to hear any suggestions!!

~~Aside:~~ ~~I did have one minor issue with the port... what to do with this code in~~ ~~TilingView.m~~

+ (Class)layerClass { 
return [CATiledLayer class]; 
}

~~It's been ported as the following in~~ ~~TilingView.cs~~ ~~but I could be way off base...~~

private CATiledLayer __layer;
public override CALayer Layer {get 
{ // set in ctor 
return __layer;
}
}

~~...HELP?!~~

* NOTE: If you download the sample from github, you MUST also download Apple's original sample to get their test image files.

MonoTouch meet WindowsPhone7

2010-09-25T21:17:00.000+10:00

This is a very basic example of how you can share data and code between the iPhone platform (using MonoTouch) and recently RTM'd Windows Phone 7.

The code is available on github... notice that the source data (restaurants.xml file) and class file (Objects.cs) are identical on both platforms, as is the XmlSerialization code that parses the data into memory for display.

You will see there is a lot more 'user code' in the MonoTouch project for iPhone - this is due to the laborious way that UITableViews must be coded*; whereas the WP7's Silverlight heritage allows some very neat databinding scenarios.

* the excellent MonoTouch.Dialog project significantly reduces this code overhead on MonoTouch - definitely give it a try!

...now I just need to put the MonoDroid version together... :-)

UIGlassButton Generator in MonoTouch

2010-08-04T21:24:00.002+10:00

Sometimes the default look of iOS controls (such as UIButton) is a little 'flat'. Apple themselves sometimes use a very pretty 'glass button' effect, which could be achieved (apparently, I'm paraphrasing here) using an undocumented UIGlassButton class. You can read more about this in the source links for this sample:

MonoTouch tips and snippets, which points to...
Martin Bowling's MTGlassButton (ZIP file), which seems related to...
Erica Sudan's Shiny buttons devsugar, which uses...
@schwa (Jonathan Wight)'s Objective-C version

Anyway... Martin did a great job porting this approach to MonoTouch, creating a GlassButton.dll wrapper as part of a sample project that allows you to create great-looking PNG-image-glass-buttons to incorporate into your iOS projects. The only thing missing was a double-resolution version for my new iPhone4's Retina Display, so that's what I've added to this github project: GlassButtonGenerator.

How it works:

Edit the string constants for button text and filename
Edit the filename which is used in the path to save the output
Run the app in the Simulator and press the [Generate Glass Button] button
Grab the images that are saved to your Desktop
Use the images in your iOS app in UIButton controls

Here is the 'output' when you are running it in the simulator (the button images should be saved to your Desktop):

If you are then wondering what to do with the two images, check out Miguel's post on Building apps for the Retina Display. Basically you should use UIImage.FromBundle to load the image and ensure that the 'regular' and 'retina' versions have the same filename (with the 'retina' version having a suffix @2x).

For the code below, the /Images/ folder has four images: BuyGlass.png, BuyGlass@2x.png, CancelGlass.png, CancelGlass@2x.png (where the @2x images have double the height & width dimensions of the base image)...

buyButton.SetImage(
     UIImage.FromBundle("Images/BuyGlass.png")
   , UIControlState.Normal);
cancelButton.SetImage(
     UIImage.FromBundle("Images/CancelGlass.png")
   , UIControlState.Normal);

Don't forget to make the Build Action: Content for your image files! And remember, DON'T use UIGlassButton in your apps directly - generate the images and include them.

UPDATE (May 2011): Miguel has posted a code-based glass button implementation which you might prefer to this pre-generated image one. See Glass button for iPhone and the code on github.

Drawing on Maps with MonoTouch

2010-07-24T15:46:00.004+10:00

iOS4 introduced new features like MKOverlay to help draw lines/routes and shapes/polygons on the MKMapView control, however it has always been possible to add these features to maps in iOS3.

Two (Objective-C) examples of displaying geometric shapes on MKMapView in iOS3 are:

Drawing polyines or routes on a MKMapView by Craig Spitzkoff, which shows how to draw a line on a map from a file of latitude/longitude points.
Drawing a Point, Line, Polygon on top of MKMapview by Rupert, which builds on the previous example to allow drawing your own lines/polygons on a map.

...it is these examples that I've ported to MonoTouch (as a Universal app: iPhone and iPad). You can grab the code from github project MapStuff and see some screenshots below:

I put together a class diagram to try and explain how they work (the classes shown are from the 2nd example, which allows you to draw your own shape).

Please remember all the hard work here has been done by the original authors. All credit goes to them. Any bugs in the MonoTouch code are mine... let me know if you find any.

iOS4 examples to follow...

More MonoTouch Machine-translation Madness!

2010-07-18T20:04:00.003+10:00

In addition to the recent dodgy Spanish localization, my TweetStation fork now has dodgy French, Japanese, German and Italian translations (courtesy of the Microsoft Translator API that was introduced at MIX10). Here's how they look:

The following two code snippets were added to ngenstrings so that once the text has been extracted from TweetStation, it is automatically translated and written to .strings files ready for inclusion in the correctly-named .lproj folders (this code hasn't been committed to github - but it should be easy to add to your local copy).

add code to the end of MainClass.Main

string[] languages = new string[]{"fr","ja","it","de"};
foreach (var language in languages)
{
   foreach (var table in tables.Values)
   {
      foreach (LocalizedString locstring in table.Values)
      {
         locstring.Value = Translate(locstring.Key, language);
      }
      table.WriteStringsFile(assemblyName, outputFormat, language);
   }
}

add method to MainClass

//http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff512421.aspx
static string Translate (string text, string toLanguageCode)
{
   string appId = "REGISTER_AND_INSERT_YOUR_APPID";
   string translation = text;
   text = text.Replace(" ", "%20").Replace("&", "").Replace("#","%3F");

   string detectUri = "http://api.microsofttranslator.com/v2/Http.svc/Translate?appId=" + appId +
  "&text=" + text + "&from=en&to=" + toLanguageCode;
   Console.WriteLine(detectUri);
   try {
      System.Net.HttpWebRequest httpWebRequest = (System.Net.HttpWebRequest)System.Net.WebRequest.Create(detectUri);
      System.Net.WebResponse resp = httpWebRequest.GetResponse();
      Stream strm = resp.GetResponseStream();
      StreamReader reader = new System.IO.StreamReader(strm);
      translation = reader.ReadToEnd();
   }
   catch (Exception e)
   {
      Console.Write("Translation failed for " + text + " - " + e.Message);
   }
   return translation;
}

Hopefully that gives you some ideas (or inspiration) on how to increase the market for your apps across the world. Remember that machine-translation is NOT a substitute for a professional human translation, however it can be useful to test your application's ability to handle and display different languages (eg. the size of the strings, etc).

TwitEstaçion: MonoTouch TweetStation en español

2010-07-16T22:12:00.008+10:00

If you are a MonoTouch developer then you should already be familiar with the two subjects of this post:

Miguel's awesome TweetStation open-source/MonoTouch Twitter client (also on iTunes); and
the recent release of the Professional iPhone Development with MonoTouch/c# book from Wrox

It just so happens that Chapter 12 - Localizing for an International Audience of the book introduces a small utility called ngenstrings that helps you to translate your application into other languages. Today I updated ngenstrings to use the latest Mono.Cecil version, and to test it out I decided to have a go at localizing TweetStation into Spanish. You can download the Localizable.strings file that was created (and translated courtesy of Bing). Here's a screenshot showing where it fits into the solution:

...and here are a couple of screenshots showing TwitEstaçion in action ;-)

NOTE: Miguel had already made a good start building an internationalized app - many of his strings were wrapped in a Locale.GetText() method which was easy for me to work with. None of his code needed to change except for Locale.Get() and Locale.Format() to add NSBundle.MainBundle.LocalizedString(str,"");
NOTE2: this was a MACHINE TRANSLATION - of course you would arrange for a real person to translate your apps before taking them to the AppStore!
NOTE3: I have not translated 100% of Miguel's app - this is for demonstration purposes at the moment.
NOTE4: It's called TwitEstaçion because "TweetEstaçion" is too long for the iPhone home screen, and gets shortened unreadably. I don't speak Spanish so who knows if that makes any sense at all!

UPDATE: a few more screenshots... (again, apologies for the machine translation:)

UPDATE2: localized code forked from TweetStation main now available on github.

MonoTouch port of TDBadgedCell

2010-07-09T21:25:00.003+10:00

I recently wanted to add an 'item count' to a UITableView in one of my iPhone/iPad projects and thought it would be nice to match the grey/encircled 'badge' used in the Mail application.

Happily, I found (via The Unofficial Apple Weblog) that Tim Davies had the same idea and already done the hard work, albeit in Objective-C. Tim's code for TDBadgedCell is on github (you can help him out and donate, too), as is the MonoTouch/C# port: TDBadgedCellSharp. Both produce the same output (shown below)

The important stuff (TDBadgeView and TDBadgeCell) is in TDBadgedCell.cs - the rest of the project is purely for demonstration purposes.

Here's a very simple example of how to use the badged cell (warning: doesn't show DequeueReusableCell which you would normally use in the GetCell method)...

public override UITableViewCell GetCell 
   (UITableView tableView, NSIndexPath indexPath)
{
   TDBadgedCell cell = new TDBadgedCell (UITableViewCellStyle.Subtitle, "Cell");
   cell.TextLabel.Text = contents[indexPath.Row].Title;
   cell.TextLabel.Font = UIFont.BoldSystemFontOfSize (14);

   cell.DetailTextLabel.Text = contents[indexPath.Row].Detail;
   cell.DetailTextLabel.Font = UIFont.SystemFontOfSize (13);

   cell.Accessory = UITableViewCellAccessory.DisclosureIndicator;
   cell.BadgeNumber = Convert.ToInt32 (contents[indexPath.Row].Badge);

   if (indexPath.Row == 1)
      cell.BadgeColor = UIColor.FromRGBA (1.000f, 0.397f, 0.419f, 1.000f);
   if (indexPath.Row == 2)
      cell.BadgeColor = UIColor.FromWhiteAlpha (0.783f, 1.000f);
   return cell;
}

Thanks Tim!

..and finally, if you didn't notice the cover at the top of this page or seen the tweets, "my" book (and Wally, Chris, Martin & Rory's :) is now available from Amazon (and other locations, in paper or PDF)!

iPad 'infinite scrolling' with MonoTouch

2010-05-03T21:59:00.008+10:00

Tonights exercise proves that sometimes it's worth taking time out to 'design' a chunk of code before writing it. Here's the "design"... can you see what it's trying to do?

Okay, I'll tell you: I'm trying to create an 'infinite' (well, just a configurable number) of scrollable pages that are rendered with UIWebView controls. I want to use the minimum number of controls for performance and memory but I also want a nice scrolling experience where the next and previous pages are aways pre-loaded. As you scroll left and right, the UIWebViews are shuffled around (X-coordinates only) to create an effect similar to the Time magazine 'app'.

Amazingly it worked out pretty quickly - here are a couple of screens to "prove" that it scrolls left & right as expected. It's using a "CSS3" multi-column hack in the Html, but that's another story...

And here are the 'important bits' of the code. I'm not publishing the entire source right now - the app still has a long way to go - but you get the idea... I hope. I only had a brief look around for existing examples so if you've seen a better one, let me know!

// declarations
UIScrollView MyScrollView;
UIWebView[] WebViewArray = new UIWebView[3];
int[] WebViewHasPage = new int[]{0,1,2};
int NumberOfPages = 8; // news01.html .. news08.html
...
// ViewController ctor
var bounds = new RectangleF(0, 0, View.Bounds.Width, View.Bounds.Height);
MyScrollView = new UIScrollView(bounds);
RectangleF scrollFrame = MyScrollView.Frame; // start with screen size
scrollFrame.Width = PageWidth * NumberOfPages; // then make the content
MyScrollView.ContentSize = scrollFrame.Size; // 8 screens wide
MyScrollView.Scrolled += ScrollViewScrolled; // and attach event handler
for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++)
{ // lay out three web controls to shuffle around
 webViewFrame.X = PageWidth * i;
 WebViewArray[i] = new UIWebView(webViewFrame);
 WebViewArray[i].ScalesPageToFit = false;
 var u = NSUrl.FromFilename(basedir+"news0"+(i+1)+".html");
 var r = new NSUrlRequest(u);
 WebViewArray[i].LoadRequest(r);
 MyScrollView.AddSubview (WebViewArray[i]);
}
...
// and the method that does the shuffling
private void ScrollViewScrolled (object sender, EventArgs e)
{
 UIScrollView sv = (UIScrollView)sender;
 double page = Math.Floor ((sv.ContentOffset.X - sv.Frame.Width / 2) / sv.Frame.Width) + 1;
 int LastPage = CurrentPage;
 int NewPage = CurrentPage;
 if (sv.ContentOffset.X % PageWidth == 0) NewPage = (int)page; // moved pages!
 if (NewPage >= 0 && NewPage < NumberOfPages)
 {
  pageControl.CurrentPage = NewPage;
  CurrentPage = NewPage;
  int updatePage = 0;
  bool shouldMove = false;
  if (NewPage > LastPage)
  {// moving right
   updatePage = NewPage + 1; shouldMove = true;
  }
  else if (NewPage < LastPage)
  {// moving left 
   updatePage = CurrentPage - 1; shouldMove = true;
  }
  if (shouldMove & (updatePage >= 0) & (updatePage < NumberOfPages))
  {
   int webViewSlot = updatePage % 3; 
   if (WebViewHasPage[webViewSlot] == updatePage) return; // already has it
   else WebViewHasPage[webViewSlot] = updatePage;
   var url = NSUrl.FromFilename(BaseDirectory+"news0"+(updatePage+1)+".html");
   var request = new NSUrlRequest(url);
   WebViewArray[webViewSlot].LoadRequest(request);
   var rect = new RectangleF (
      WebViewArray[0].Frame.Width * updatePage
    , WebViewArray[webViewSlot].Frame.Y
    , WebViewArray[webViewSlot].Frame.Width
    , WebViewArray[webViewSlot].Frame.Height);
   WebViewArray[webViewSlot].Frame = rect;
  }
 }
 else
 {
  Console.WriteLine ("Scrolled a little too far, to page " + page);
 }
}

Anatomy of a c# iPhone app (with MonoTouch)

2010-03-09T20:36:00.017+11:00

Wow - it has been a long time since my last post... and with good reason ;)

Firstly I've been busily writing (along with Wally, Chris, Martin & Rory) for Wrox' upcoming Professional iPhone Programming with MonoTouch and .NET/C# which is available for pre-order on Amazon. If you are interested in developing for the iPhone using C# and the .NET Framework it should be a great addition to all the resources already out there on the web.

Secondly I've been working on an iPhone app for MIX10 in Las Vegas next week (with help from Chris, Miguel & Geoff). It is now available FREE on the AppStore and has a website at mix10.confapp.com. Whether you are heading to MIX or just curious about C# and MonoTouch on the iPhone, why not download and give it a try?

Since the MIX10.app was first 'announced' on twitter #MIX10 there have been a number of requests for the source code. Unfortunately the source isn't public at the moment, however that doesn't mean we can't talk about "how it works". To start with, the MIX10.app is based on two previous iPhone apps written in C# with MonoTouch, and whose source code is available:

Monospace09 code is on github and is discussed on my blog (and here)
PDC09 is on github and discussed in this post

If you have an Intel Mac (with Snow Leopard) then you can download both the Apple SDK and the MonoTouch trial version for free and get both these C# .NET examples running in the iPhone Simulator for yourself. To deploy on a real iPhone requires certificates and licences (from Apple and Novell/MonoTouch respectively).

MIX10.app
Here's the overall class diagram for the MIX10.app (with the views shown too). Even without seeing the code it's clear that the classes themselves are not overly complex (ie. few methods are required; and inheritance can be leveraged to share common functionality).

The MIX10.app also uses Miguel's MonoTouch.Dialog framwork and he's posted a snippet of code on gist.github which is responsible for this screen (on the left)

And he also posted this code which creates the 'My Schedule' view on the right. Pretty neat use of Linq, eh? I'm not sure I've seen such an expressive user-interface expressed in so few lines of code before...

public class FavoritesViewController : DialogViewController {
  public FavoritesViewController () : base (null) { }
  public override void ViewWillAppear (bool animated)
  {
    var favs = AppDelegate.UserData.GetFavoriteCodes();
    Root = new RootElement ("Favorites") {
      from s in AppDelegate.ConferenceData.Sessions
        where favs.Contains(s.Code)
        group s by s.Start into g
        orderby g.Key
        select new Section (MakeCaption ("", g.Key)) {
          from hs in g
            select (Element) new SessionElement (hs)
        }
    };
  }
}

The object model closely follows the data available from the api.visitmix.com site's OData and RSS feeds. These are plain vanilla C# objects which also run on the server to download and package the data for the iPhone - the object graph is serialized by a .NET application on Windows Server 2003, downloaded by the WebClient class on the iPhone (thanks to MonoTouch) and de-serialized ready for display. A perfect example of the cross-platform possibilities facilitated by MonoTouch and having the .NET framework available on both server and mobile device.

Finally, here's a quick overview of ALL the screens in the app. Did I mention you should give it a try?

...and if you're a Windows Phone Series 7 fan-in-the-making, it should be obvious that having a shared set of services and functionality in C# that can be deployed across iPhones with MonoTouch, and Silverlight/Windows Phone 7 with only UI code needing to be customized is a great way to achieve maximum reach for your apps. The MonoTouch Roadmap is also targetting a Q3 release of MonoDroid, so with a bit of imagination it isn't hard to see where the future of cross-mobile-device development is heading...

MonoTouch MapKit.Delegate-precated

2010-01-16T16:39:00.010+11:00

An update to MonoTouch (1.4.4) was released today with these changes/improvements (actually 1.4.5 was released a day later). One in particular caught my eye, since I've previously blogged about MapKit in MonoTouch.

MKMapView now has C# style events

So what does that mean? Basically the crafty team at Novell have turned the Apple SDK "pattern" of using a MKMapViewDelegate class to respond to "events" on its head, and instead exposed familiar .NET events on MKMapView itself. *

Here's a comparison of the 'old' and 'new' MKMapView class:

Here are two 'example' delegate methods that work in 1.4.4 (and .5). Firstly here's an example of wiring up one of the "new" events CalloutAccessoryControlTapped. NOTE the += used to attach the delegate to the event.

Map.CalloutAccessoryControlTapped += 
      delegate(object sender, MKMapViewAccessoryTappedEventArgs e)
{
   MyAnnotation myAnn = e.View.Annotation as MyAnnotation;
   using (var alert = new UIAlertView (myAnn.Title,
     myAnn.Subtitle + " clicked", null, "OK", null))
   {
      alert.Show();
   }
};

The second example is probably the most common one - GetViewForAnnotation - which you will need to provide if you want to do any sort of customization of your pins/callouts. NOTE how it is assigned with an equals sign and has a return value!

Map.GetViewForAnnotation = delegate (MKMapView mapView, NSObject annotation) {
   if (annotation is MKUserLocation) return null;
   MyAnnotation myAnn = annotation as MyAnnotation;
   var annView = mapView.DequeueReusableAnnotation ("pin");
   if (annView == null) {
      var pinView = new MKPinAnnotationView(myAnn, "pin");
      pinView.AnimatesDrop = true;
      pinView.CanShowCallout = true;
      annView = pinView;
   }
   else 
   {
     annView.Annotation = annotation;
   }
   return annView;
};

* imagine these are "air quotes" in this paragraph
p.s. This post has been updated since the comments below. The first two kinda don't make sense now... Thanks for the advice mdi.

Moonlight 2.0...

2009-12-27T22:30:00.006+11:00

Decided it was time to take another look at Moonlight (since 2.0 was released on 17-Dec-09), so I grabbed a Virtual PC image download and within a few minutes was testing my existing Silverlight sites on Linux! The pre-installed software (Firefox, Moonlight, even MonoDevelop) makes 'getting started' super-easy.

Happily, RaceReplay.net works fine -- although it uses the 'CTP' of Microsoft's Map control - the RTW requires SL3 which might throw a spanner in the works :-(

The DeepEarth open-source DeepZoom-based map control does work, however, which is great.

Searcharoo's Silverlight UI breaks with Could not load type 'BufferedStreamReader' from assembly System.Json so I'll have to investigate that; might have to get a different Json lib.

Anyway, IMO Moonlight 2.0 is a great achievement by Novell and the VPC is a great way for .NET developers to learn about it... have fun!

iPhone Obj-C books for MonoTouch devs (first look)

2009-11-10T20:07:00.006+11:00

UPDATE 6-JUN-10:This book Professional iPhone Programming with MonoTouch and .NET/C# is available for pre-order on Amazon... one of the authors might be familiar :-)

UPDATE 2-DEC-09: the first MonoTouch-specific book (that I know of) is now available to purchase/download - Building iPhone and iPod touch Applications for the .NET/C# Developer with MonoTouch (Wrox Blox). I haven't had a chance to read closely yet, but it's good value at USD6.99 so definitely worth a look.

I recently received yet another addition to my 'Objective-C books for iPhone Development' collection - initially started to learn Obj-C (never happened) they are now more of a reference while learning MonoTouch.

Firstly, I have NOT read them cover-to-cover... I've done a bit of flicking, a bit of skimming and read a chapter or two. Secondly, I'm not really evaluating them according to their original purpose - to teach Objective-C - rather I'm making a personal judgement on their suitability as reference material for .NET developers.

I've listed them in their "order of usefulness" for MonoTouch .NET devs (according to me :)

Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK [BEGINNING IPHONE DEV]
Dave Mark; Jeff LaMarche (APress)

This was the first iPhone book I purchased, so I've read it more closely than the rest. I learned quite a bit from various examples and discussions in this book - it's probably at the top of the list for this reason. The writing style is easy to read and there isn't too much emphasis on Xcode (other books do seem to focus on Xcode, the Head First one most heavily).

The initial chapters are probably best replaced with a MonoTouch 'Hello World' screencast - you don't really need to know all the Xcode, pch files and @synthesize that the book discusses (and there are quite a few free resources around that cover "your first MonoTouch app").

Pros
• Interface Builder examples are relevant
• Friendly colloquial tone
• Widest variety of topics (includes localization, accelerometer)

Cons
• Large swaths of Objective-C in some chapters
• Still need to decode Objective-C in the examples

Overall, though, my favorite of the bunch.

The iPhone Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK
Erica Sadun (Addison Wesley)

I'm a big fan of Erica's from her blog and applications when the iPhone and iPod Touch first appeared and were programmable. Text is easy to read. Erica often references "when the iPhone first appeared" or "during the Beta period" - often interesting insights that add some fun to the text. There are also references to many 'undocumented' APIs - they're clearly highlighted to avoid confusion, but unfortunately they're even more difficult to use from MonoTouch than Objective-C... I felt a bit "left out" on first reading, although with btouch in MonoTouch 1.2 I'm wondering whether it might be easier to access these APIs now? (even though we're not supposed to...)

Chapter 2 - Views - does a really nice job of gradually introducing various concepts, and the Objective-C is minimal. That chapter on it's own is probably worth reading for anyone coming to iPhone programming. The rest of the first half is also fairly easy to follow (View Controllers, Basic Tables) - if the examples were in C# they might be my favorite 'introduction to iphone programming' :)

Towards the end of the book the amount of Objective-C does increase to a few multi-page listings that are more difficult to read (and probably beyond beginning C#ers) but overall the book is good value.

There is a 2nd edition due in January 2010 which will probably address my other main concern with this book: that it pre-dates the latest iPhone OS releases and hardware. Not a big deal really, but it's always nice to have info on the latest and greatest.

iPhone SDK Application Development: Building Applications for the AppStore
Jonathan Zdziarski (O'Reilly)

Less "reading" in this book - rather than longer explanatory paragraphs the author uses smaller chunks of text interspersed with bullet points, callouts and small and large Objective-C listings. This actually makes it better as a reference book than a front-to-back learning tool - and that makes it more suitable for MonoTouch in my view.

As with the other titles, the initial chapters cover Objective-C concepts like messaging, implementation, protocols, categories and posing(!) which you aren't likely to need as you start out with MonoTouch (although you might return to read about them later, to get your head around more complex examples).

I've used the remainder of the book to 'look up' various things that I want to learn about or need examples of, usually as a backup/alternative to the material that I've found in other books or on the web. It doesn't have the breadth of "Beginning iPhone Dev" nor the easy readability of Erica's stuff, but I have definitely picked up some useful tidbits from this book.

Head First iPhone Development: A Learner's Guide to Creating Objective-C Applications for the iPhone
Dan Pilone; Tracey Pilone (O'Reilly)

I love the Head First series from O'Reilly, so I was determined to like this book; and it definitely lives up to it's promise as a Head First title. The writing, imagery, exercises and screenshots are all as you'd expect and it is really good at explaining Objective-C, Xcode and Interface Builder concepts... however that's partly what makes this volume less useful for C#ers: the writers go out of their way to explain/show how to do everything with Xcode and Interface Builder! As a MonoTouch developer I find myself only in MonoDevelop writing code and building my interfaces in code... so to my dismay I find myself unable to put this book at the top of my list.

It is still a fun read, and the non-techy bits (of which there are many) are extremely relevant to ALL iPhone devs. The recommendation to design your UI on paper, to follow Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, to remember to test on a Touch, and much more... if I ever decide to really learn Objective-C, I'll probably come back to this book and run through all the examples from go-to-whoa since it does try to teach the language and the SDK (and I really need help with my memory management!).

iPhone Cool Projects
Bennett et al (Apress)

The most 'attractive' of the five, due to the easy-to-read typesetting and colorful (yes COLOR) layout and imagery; this book probably doesn't really even belong in the list. It is more of a 'discussion' of iPhone application design - there is a fair amount of Objective-C throughout but it's mainly used to illustrate points of discussion, and the chunks are small enough that a C# developer can easily scan them.

Definitely fun to read - but you'll want any/all of the other books first to advance your knowledge of the iPhone SDK and Objective-C before you start trying to use the examples in this book. It probably isn't a good choice as a 'reference' or a learning tool for C#ers until you've got a few apps under your belt.

Finally...
As time passes and my knowledge increases my opinion of these books might change. Perhaps others have different opinions on what makes a good "Obj-C for C#" book, or have come across other titles? I'm sure there'll be C#/MonoTouch specific titles on the market eventually - it will be interesting to see how they read too!

Another MonoTouch 'conference app' - PDC09

2009-11-09T21:54:00.006+11:00

I'm not planning on making a habit of this, but having spent the time putting together the Monospace conference app and seeing tweets from various Mono people that they were heading to PDC09, I figured it wouldn't take too long to copy some PDC data into the existing MonoTouch C# app 'framework'.

A new view (Sessions), a new icon (Speakers) and a new location (Underground) are the main changes - the rest is just SQLite and graphic tweaks. The source is available for download - PDC09_01.zip (124Kb).

NOTE: This is for demonstration purposes only - the Speakers data is incomplete and the Schedule & Sessions are subject to change! Use at your own risk :)

UPDATE: to be clear, this app is not available on the AppStore -- it is just an example of the kind of thing you can write in C# for the iPhone using MonoTouch from Novell. If you have a MonoTouch licence then you can download the source (124Kb) and install it on your phone.

MonoTouch UINavigationController Placemat

2009-11-02T21:56:00.007+11:00

In one of my other posts I included a 'placemat' diagram to help make sense of the code.

Someone commented that they found the presentation useful, so as a quick post today I decided to placemat the Roget's 1911 Thesaurus sample.

Note that I'm not suggesting this is the neatest, tidiest, best-practice way to structure a MonoTouch application (I'm learning along with everyone else). This is purely to help you find your way around the example code.

For example... on thing I learned is that I didn't really need to pass an instance of the 'root' MainViewController around - each UIViewController has a NavigationController property referencing the UINavigationController that 'contains' it. Therefore any given UIViewController that has been added to a UINavigationController can call this.PushViewController (or else pass a reference to this into the UITableViewDelegate constructor to use in RowSelected.

MonoTouch "Corp411" (part III: Revenge of System.Data)

2009-10-26T20:48:00.005+11:00

As promised, the Corp411 sample app has been 'converted' from sqlite-net to System.Data. MonoTouch 1.2 isn't quite out yet, so you must follow the instructions on this page to download the System.Data assemblies to your installation, put them in the correct place AND add references to your MonoDevelop solution for Mono.Data.Sqlite.dll, Mono.Data.Tds.dll, System.Data.dll, System.Transactions.dll (I'm not sure if they're all required, but it seemed like a sensible set).

It's pretty easy to use after all that:

// db is the path to the SQLite database file
var conn = new SqliteConnection("Data Source=" + db);

and

listData = new List<Employee>();
// System.Data from http://monotouch.net/Documentation/System.Data
var sd = new SystemDataHelper("phonebook");
var connection = sd.GetConnection();
using (var cmd = connection.CreateCommand())
{
   connection.Open ();  
   cmd.CommandText = "SELECT Firstname, Lastname, Work, Mobile,"
                   + "  Department, Email "
                   + " FROM Phonebook ORDER BY Lastname";  
   using (var reader = cmd.ExecuteReader ()) 
   {
      while (reader.Read ()) 
      {  
         var emp = new Employee();
         emp.Firstname = (string)reader["Firstname"]; 
         emp.Lastname = (string)reader["Lastname"]; 
         emp.Work = (string)reader["Work"];
         emp.Mobile = (string)reader["Mobile"]; 
         emp.Department = (string)reader["Department"]; 
         emp.Email = (string)reader["Email"];
         Console.WriteLine("Column {0}",reader["Lastname"]);
         listData.Add(emp);
      }  
   } 
}

Cool eh? Doesn't that look familiar... good old ADO.NET :-)

THE CODE
That's a small part of the System.Data namespace, so the code is pretty small :) here 'tis Corp411.3.zip (38Kb)

... and proof it runs on a device ...

MonoTouch "Corp411" (part II)

2009-10-23T22:12:00.007+11:00

A minor update to the Corporate Phonebook incorporating the custom UITableViewCell from Simon (UITableView now shows name and department in each cell; also added a disclosure indicator). Handles RowSelected and uses OpenUrl to call and email.

The MonoDevelop solution is available to download (41Kb).

//TODO: give the new MonoTouch 1.2 System.Data implementation a try!

//HACK: System.Data example now available (26-Oct)

MonoTouch flip-flop with UIView animation

2009-10-21T21:51:00.006+11:00

Thanks to Beginning iPhone Development's Objective-C examples the Monospace app now does a flip-flop between two views (the map and a new list of map locations to 'pan to'). The source code is available for download (you'll also notice the UI has been made "black"... I just like the way it looks).

Monospace22.zip (188Kb)

The view is driven by the MapFlipViewController (which is what we add to the TabViewController). It is responsible for creating/displaying the two 'flippable' views using UIView animation features.

The two views - MapViewController & MapLocationViewController - have a constructor which accepts a reference to the 'flipper' so they can call back to it's Flip() method, which looks something like this...

UIView.BeginAnimations("Flipper");
UIView.SetAnimationDuration(1.25);
UIView.SetAnimationCurve(UIViewAnimationCurve.EaseInOut);
if (mapView.View.Superview == null)
{
   Console.WriteLine("to map");
   UIView.SetAnimationTransition 
        (UIViewAnimationTransition.FlipFromRight, this.View, true);
   locationView.ViewWillAppear(true);
   mapView.ViewWillDisappear(true);
 
   locationView.View.RemoveFromSuperview();
   this.View.AddSubview(mapView.View);

   mapView.ViewDidDisappear(true);
   locationView.ViewDidAppear(true);
}
else
{
   Console.WriteLine("to list");
   UIView.SetAnimationTransition 
         (UIViewAnimationTransition.FlipFromLeft, this.View, true);
   mapView.ViewWillAppear(true);
   locationView.ViewWillDisappear(true);
 
   mapView.View.RemoveFromSuperview();
   this.View.AddSubview(locationView.View);
 
   locationView.ViewDidDisappear(true);
   mapView.ViewDidAppear(true);
}
UIView.CommitAnimations();

There is other code to actually set the map to a specific location - but that's actually pretty simple :)

mapView.SetLocation(toLocation);

Monospace app .1 release

2009-10-19T22:07:00.006+11:00

The first version of the Monospace schedule app had a few issues (extra UITableView lines, for example); here is an updated version (with at least one less bug):

Monospace21.zip (183Kb)

A couple of additional features were also added...

UITabBarController More & Edit
Two of the cool things about UITabBarController are (a) when you add more than five items, it automatically creates the More... option; and (b) when the More list is visible you can also edit the order/position of items in the tab bar. Bonus!

There is a new 'Sponsors' ViewController to show this functionality:

I've used a UIWebView with images saved locally as a quick hack to get the sponsors page working. Setting the baseUrl makes is easy to reference images saved in the application bundle from local Html.

string basedir = Environment.GetFolderPath 
     (System.Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal);
basedir = basedir.Replace("Documents", "Monospace2.app");
webView.LoadHtmlString(FormatText(), 
     new NSUrl(basedir+"/Sponsors/", true));

CoreLocation with MapKit
The MapViewController now also uses CoreLocation.CLLocationManager and custom delegate to track your location and calculate the distance to the conference center:

It also includes a new UISegmentedControl to change the map style.

MonoTouch sans Interface Builder

2009-10-18T19:29:00.008+11:00

I have nothing against Interface Builder per se, but as I've said before when developing with Visual Studio I shun the design surface (if you've used the Xaml preview feature prior to 2010 you'll understand why). I also think you get a better understanding of your environment (and a greater ability to customize your UI) if you can create it in code.

But for new MonoTouch developers it can be difficult to figure out how to create something in code. I've just been through this adding a UISegmentedControl to the Monospace app... here are my (rather obvious) suggestions:

Autocomplete/Intellisense™ - the easiest and most obvious thing to try is reading through the properties and methods available to you via MonoDevelop. I got the UITabBarController (mostly) working this way.
Interface Builder - look closely at the IB Inspector windows to get some ideas about the properties exposed.
XIB file - further to the Inspector windows, the XIB file (in its weird XMLish format) might also give you some hints. Obviously this means you need to 'draw' the control/s in IB, but just roughly for inspiration...
Objective-C references - for now most search results will be from Objective-C devs; it isn't hard to decode them (usually) so don't be dissuaded because it "looks different" :)
Try Miguel's Rosetta stone decoder for Objective-C classes/properties → MonoTouch
MonoTouch docs - last but not least, the documentation will help you. Bookmark it now.

XIB and Inspector

UISegmentedControl in c#

// Don't forget your using statements 
// this example uses MonoTouch.MapKit 
// as well as UIKit and Foundation
var segmentedControl = new UISegmentedControl();
segmentedControl.Frame = new RectangleF(20, 350, 282,44);
segmentedControl.InsertSegment("Map", 0, false);
segmentedControl.InsertSegment("Satellite", 1, false);
segmentedControl.InsertSegment("Hybrid", 2, false);
segmentedControl.SelectedSegment = 0;
segmentedControl.ControlStyle = UISegmentedControlStyle.Plain;

segmentedControl.ValueChanged += delegate {
   if (segmentedControl.SelectedSegment == 0)
      mapView.MapType = MonoTouch.MapKit.MKMapType.Standard;
   else if (segmentedControl.SelectedSegment == 1)
      mapView.MapType = MonoTouch.MapKit.MKMapType.Satellite;
   else if (segmentedControl.SelectedSegment == 2)
      mapView.MapType = MonoTouch.MapKit.MKMapType.Hybrid;
};
// And further down the code, don't forget to Add it!
this.View.AddSubview(segmentedControl);

MonoTouch for Monospace

2009-10-17T18:50:00.011+11:00

Monospace is coming up fast, with a whole day's worth of MonoTouch sessions. With that in mind, it seems kinda obvious to make the Monospace schedule available as a MonoTouch app...

Here are some screenshots:

In short, it provides:

Conference schedule (day/session/detail views)
Speakers (list/detail)
Access to the monospaceconf blog
Access to @monospace_conf's stream on Twitter
A map of the conference location

Some of the fun MonoTouch things I learned along the way include:

Creating a UITabBarController in code (no IB)
Making icons for UITabBarItem (hint)
Creating an 'image watermark' with UIImage behind a UITableView (thanks Mike)
Using Linq for Xml to parse Atom feeds (like RSS)
Implementing the latest SQLite wrapper from Frank
Changing the default UITableViewCell layout in code (eg mutiple lines)
Creating a custom UITableViewCell with LoadNib (thanks Simon)

I hope to write some more detail on each of these items... but for now you can download and run the code for yourself:

Monospace2.zip (94Kb)

UPDATE 19-Oct: newer version available
Monospace21.zip (183Kb)

UPDATE 21-Oct: even newer version available
Monospace22.zip (188Kb)

and here's an annotated class diagram/placemat to help make sense of it all:

WARNING: there are plenty of shortcomings/hacks/missing features including: weird lines on the Speaker UITableView, no reloading of data from Blogger or Twitter without restarting, heaps of weird "pointer being freed was not allocated" errors accompanying the SQLite code (only visible in the Application Output window) and probably a pile of bugs I'm not aware of.
USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

MonoTouch "Roget's 1911 Thesaurus"

2009-10-08T20:41:00.012+11:00

This sample was inspired by Roget’s Hierarchical Thesaurus in a Silverlight App. I highly recommend you check out the Silverlight Thesaurus 'visualization' as it will give you some idea about why it seemed like a good match for the iPhone UINavigationController (ie. a hierarchy). The fact that it's not a uniform depth just makes the problem more interesting.

Charles very generously provided me with the source data he worked on to produce the Silverlight app (and the associated C# classes). It's great that MonoTouch allows existing .NET source to be re-used so easily.

Here are some screenshots of the iPhone app:

Xml de-serialization is easy...
Loading 2.6Mb of Xml data into an object graph is so easy with the System.Xml.Serialization support in MonoTouch!

using (TextReader reader = new StreamReader("roget15aCategories.xml"))
{
   XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(RogetCategories));
   Categories = (RogetCategories)serializer.Deserialize(reader);
}

...but don't forget the linker
When you create the classes you will be de-serializing "into", don't forget to mark them with the MonoTouch.Foundation attribute [Preserve(AllMembers=true)]. This prevents the compiler/linker from 'optimising away' parts of your class that don't "appear" to be referenced in code (eg. the constructor) because they are only getting called at runtime as part of the deserialization process. Instead of marking the class declaration, you could alternatively mark specific members with [Preserve] to give you greater control over the final output.

Use Linq
Another great piece of .NET support is Linq. It isn't referenced in MonoDevelop MonoTouch solutions by default, so don't forget to right-click your References and tick System.Xml.Linq then add the using clause and Linq away...

public List GetRange (string start, string end)
{
   Console.WriteLine("Get {0} to {1}", start, end);
   var l = from c in Categories
      where c.Index >= start.ToNumber() && c.Index <= end.ToNumber()
      select c;
   return l.ToList();
}

Use Extension Methods
Obviously if Linq works, so do extension methods. ToNumber() is a very simple (contrived, even) example of an extension method in MonoTouch:

public static class RogetExtensions
{
   public static int ToNumber(this string num)
   {
      string s = num.Replace("a","");
      int index;
      if (int.TryParse(s, out index))
         return index;
      else
         return -1;
   }
}

"Look ma, no Interface Builder"
As I .NET developer I usually shun the design surface (in Xaml you don't really have a choice) so I was keen to try building an iPhone app without Interface Builder. It's a little difficult knowing where to start, but this UITableView in code example was immensely helpful.

There are four ViewControllers, and the basic format is the same for each: inherit from UIViewController (or a subclass), build up some controls in ViewDidLoad() and implement any additional delegates required.

The scrolling table views look like this:

// no XIB !
tableView = new UITableView()
{
    Delegate = new TableViewDelegate(Classes, this),
    DataSource = new TableViewDataSource(Classes, this),
    AutoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizing.FlexibleHeight|
                       UIViewAutoresizing.FlexibleWidth,
    BackgroundColor = UIColor.White,
};
tableView.SizeToFit();
tableView.Frame = new RectangleF (
    0, 0, this.View.Frame.Width, this.View.Frame.Height);
this.View.AddSubview(tableView);

and the 'details view' like this:

// no XIB !
webView = new UIWebView()
{
 ScalesPageToFit = false
};
webView.LoadHtmlString(FormatText(), new NSUrl());
webView.SizeToFit();
webView.Frame = new RectangleF (
    0, 0, this.View.Frame.Width, this.View.Frame.Height);
this.View.AddSubview(webView);

Look in MainViewController.cs and AppController.cs to see how they are all wired together. The other ViewControllers pass around a reference to MainViewController so they can call mvc.NavigationController.PushViewController (????, true); which makes the navigation work (automatic 'back' buttons, animation between views, etc). I've no idea if this is the best way to do it, but hey it works :)

THE CODE
This sample code would not have been possible without the hard work of others. It also uses content which can have copyright/ownership implications.

Thank you to Charles Petzold for (a) researching/parsing the text (b) writing and supplying the .NET classes used to access it and (c) allowing his work to be included in this derivative
Acknowledgement to Project Gutenburg for providing the original text. The copyright status is listed as Not copyrighted in the United States. If you live elsewhere check the laws of your country before downloading this ebook. - I presume the same applies to users of this derivative work
Sabon Rai MonoTouch posts including UITableView in code taught me a lot.

Anyway, you can download the MonoDevelop solution and try it for yourself.

These two class diagrams show the structure of the code. The first shows the classes that are used to deserialize the Xml data:

while this shows the application and viewcontroller implementations:

MonoTouch "iSOFlair" 2.0

2009-10-06T22:06:00.012+11:00

The original iSOFlair post was purely a demonstration of using Settings.bundle root.plist to drive the iPhone Settings application. It's just a bit of fun with the "Flair" feature of stackoverflow.com and related sites.

Since then I've incorporated:

Simon's Page Control sample (with added Page Control handling)
Download and save image via HTTP
Shake gesture support
Screen capture to Photos, filesystem
Set the badge on the application's icon

This is what it looks like:

and you can download the MonoTouch v1.1 source code to try for yourself.

Settings via root.plist
Configuring the iSOFlair application to show a particular user's statistics is done by the built-in iPhone Settings on the home screen. Creating the Settings.bundle and root.plist is covered in this post.

Page Control
Simon's sample makes it easy to set-up a Page Control with swiping however it's also possible to move between 'pages' by touching to the left or right of the dots. I added this delegate to FinishedLaunching to handle that case:

// handler for when the user navigates via the pager, rather than swiping
pageControl.ValueChanged += delegate(object sender, EventArgs e) {
   var pc = (UIPageControl)sender;
   double fromPage = Math.Floor((scrollView.ContentOffset.X - scrollView.Frame.Width / 2) / scrollView.Frame.Width) + 1;
   var toPage = pc.CurrentPage;
   var pageOffset = scrollView.ContentOffset.X + scrollView.Frame.Width;
   Console.WriteLine("fromPage " + fromPage + " toPage " + toPage); 
   if (fromPage > toPage)
      pageOffset = scrollView.ContentOffset.X - scrollView.Frame.Width;
   PointF p = new PointF(pageOffset, 0);
   scrollView.SetContentOffset(p,true);
   list[toPage].ViewController.BecomeFirstResponder(); // so it can "accept" shakes
   // so we can change the 'badge' on the application icon
   maxPageVisited = maxPageVisited<toPage?toPage:maxPageVisited;
};

Download, save and display PNG in UIImage
With using System.Net added to the file, the following code will download a remote image, save to the filesystem on the iPhone and set that image to display in a UIImage control on your view:

string ImagePath = Environment.GetFolderPath (Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal);
ImagePath = Path.Combine (DocumentsDirectory, Site.PreferencesPrefix+"gravatar.png");
WebClient wc = new WebClient();
Uri uri = new Uri(gravatarUrl);
try
{ 
   wc.DownloadFile (uri, ImagePath); // saves to filesystem
} 
catch (Exception ex1) {Console.Write("oops");}
//UIImage img = UIImage.FromFile (ImagePath); // WHY does this break???
UIImage img = UIImage.FromFileUncached(ImagePath); // BUT this works???
if (img != null)
   this.imageAvatar.Image = img; // displays on View

Shake gesture
Responding to the iPhone OS 3.0 'shake' gesture was covered in this post. As I said before, showing the network activity indicator UIApplication.SharedApplication.NetworkActivityIndicatorVisible=true; and then false is a good idea so the user knows that something is going on!

Screen capture
Using UIGraphics ImageContext to take a screenshot was covered in this post.

Set badge
The 'badge' is pretty contrived in this example. Every time the application starts (in FinishedLaunching) I start the badge at '4' then during paging we reduce the count for each page that has been viewed. Just before the app closes (in WillTerminate) we set the badge via

UIApplication.SharedApplication.ApplicationIconBadgeNumber = 3 - maxPageVisited;

so that it is effectively showing the number of 'unviewed' panels in the application for the last execution.

THE CODE
You can download the MonoDevelop solution to try it for yourself. The c# files are also listed below for your perusal:

MonoTouch screen capture in c# code

2009-10-05T20:46:00.008+11:00

In a previous post I said that if you capture a screenshot of your application's final 'state' (say in WillTerminate) and save it as Default.png then it would be used as the 'splash screen' next time the application starts (the built-in iPhone apps like Mail seem to do this by zooming in/out with a screen capture of their last state).

The code below takes a screenshot, and was supposed to overwrite the Default.png you have in your MonoTouch application root (eg. iSOFlair.app/) and become the new splash screen. In order to 'test' this theory I had to write the code below and place it in UIViewController subclasses that I wanted to 'capture'.

Anyway, here's the code... not sure what other uses it might have?

/// <summary>
/// Capture a copy of the current View and:
/// * re-display in a UIImage control
/// * save to the Photos collection
/// * save to disk in the application's Documents folder
/// </summary>
public void ScreenCapture()
{
   var documentsDirectory = Environment.GetFolderPath
                                  (Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal);

   Console.WriteLine("start capture of frame: " + this.View.Frame.Size);
   UIGraphics.BeginImageContext(View.Frame.Size); 
   var ctx = UIGraphics.GetCurrentContext();
   if (ctx != null)
   {
      View.Layer.RenderInContext(ctx);
      UIImage img = UIGraphics.GetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
      UIGraphics.EndImageContext();
  
      // Set to display in a UIImage control _on_ the view
      imageLogo.Image = img;
  
      // Save to Photos
      img.SaveToPhotosAlbum(
         (sender, args)=>{Console.WriteLine("image saved to Photos");}
      );
  
      // Save to application's Documents folder
      string png = Path.Combine (documentsDirectory, "Screenshot.png");
      // HACK: overwrite the splash screen. iSOFlair is the application name
      //string png = Path.Combine (documentsDirectory, "../iSOFlair.app/Default.png");
      NSData imgData = img.AsPNG();
      NSError err = null;
      if (imgData.Save(png, false, out err))
      {
         Console.WriteLine("saved as " + png);
      } else {
         Console.WriteLine("NOT saved as" + png + 
                            " because" + err.LocalizedDescription);
      }
   }
   else
   {
      Console.WriteLine("ctx null - doesn't seem to happen");
   }
}

Now your MonoTouch iPhone app would appear to "startup" much faster :) There is still a bit of a trick with the View.Frame.Size - doesn't take the status bar into account - which I will try to fix up in future. UPDATE: Tested in Simulator - works fine - but doesn't appear to work on the Device :-(.

Here is a useful ObjectiveC image tricks post that was helpful.

p.s. for those who don't already know - as a user you can always take a screen capture of the current display by pressing the Home and Power buttons at the same time... a new file will be created in your Photos : Camera Roll.

MonoTouch shake shake shake

2009-10-03T19:46:00.002+10:00

I like the way the iPhone Facebook application updates on a shake (no wasted screen real-estate with an Update button), so I went looking for some ideas how to do it. This StackOverflow thread about shake API describes both 'old school' (using accelerometer) and new OS3.0 built-in MotionEnded methods.

This c# code for MonoTouch just uses the OS3.0 feature - it's easier and the Simulator Hardware menu has a Shake Gesture item for testing :)

Firstly, in your Main.cs (or wherever FinishedLaunching is defined) add

UIApplication.SharedApplication.ApplicationSupportsShakeToEdit = true;

then put this code in your UIViewController subclass/es.

#region respond to shaking (OS3+)
public override bool CanBecomeFirstResponder {
   get {
      return true;
   }
}
public override void ViewDidAppear (bool animated)
{
   base.ViewDidAppear (animated);
   this.BecomeFirstResponder();
}
public override void ViewWillDisappear (bool animated)
{
   this.ResignFirstResponder();
   base.ViewWillDisappear (animated);
}
public override void MotionEnded (UIEventSubtype motion, UIEvent evt)
{
   Console.WriteLine("Motion detected");
   if (motion ==  UIEventSubtype.MotionShake)
   {
      Console.WriteLine("and was a shake");
      // Do your application-specific shake response here...
      Update();   
   }
}
#endregion

Within your Update method (or whatever you call it), you probably want to wrap your internet access with code to show/hide the network indicator spinner in the status bar (NetworkActivityIndicatorVisible = true) so the user knows that something is happening. Here's a basic example:

WebClient wc = new WebClient();
Uri uri = new Uri("http://sample.corp/stuff");
byte[] bytes = null;
try {
   UIApplication.SharedApplication.NetworkActivityIndicatorVisible = true;
   bytes = wc.DownloadData(uri);
}
catch (Exception ex) {
   Console.WriteLine("Internet connection failed: " + ex.Message);
   return;
} 
finally {
   UIApplication.SharedApplication.NetworkActivityIndicatorVisible = false;
}

NOTE: other iPhone applications use the shake gesture for Undo - here's a simple NSUndoManager example (ObjectiveC, but fairly easy to follow).

MonoTouch MapKit 103

2009-09-27T21:10:00.016+10:00

UPDATE 13-Oct: This code all works in the latest version of MonoTouch - v1.1 - on devices AND in the simulator. You can download a MonoDevelop solution or view the c# files:

UPDATE 28-Sep:confirmation from Geoff that the problem with the Simulator should be fixed in 1.1, coming soon...

Once again thanks to a hint from Geoff, I've pieced a little more of MapKit together. This has been tested with RC2 of MonoTouch. The trick? It ONLY WORKS ON THE DEVICE - the simulator will 'crash' with the Stack Trace shown at the bottom of this post (I'm sure this will be fixed in a future release).

This code in FinishedLaunching
Once again, use the 'new' AddAnnotationObject method.

mapView.Delegate = new MapViewDelegate(this);
MyAnnotation a = new MyAnnotation(
    new CLLocationCoordinate2D(-33.867139,151.207114)
    , "Home"
   , "is where the heart is"
   );
Console.WriteLine(" ### This breaks in the simulator BUT it works on device!!!");
mapView.AddAnnotationObject(a);

with this MKAnnotation subclass
In MonoTouch MKAnnotation is an abstract class, but in ObjectiveC it's a @protocol. This kinda explains why everything in the class is read-only - @protocols are akin to interfaces in C#, but they cannot be "modelled" as interfaces in MonoTouch because @protocols members can be optional! The simplest way to get an annotation is therefore this implementation (although I think you could also create your own subclass of NSObject and Export() the MKAnnotation members manually).

public class MyAnnotation : MKAnnotation
{
   private CLLocationCoordinate2D _coordinate;
   private string _title, _subtitle;
   public override CLLocationCoordinate2D Coordinate {
      get { return _coordinate; }
   }
   public override string Title {
      get { return _title; }
   }
   public override string Subtitle {
      get { return _subtitle; }
   }
   /// <summary>
   /// Need this constructor to set the fields, since the public
   /// interface of this class is all READ-ONLY
   /// <summary>
   public MyAnnotation (CLLocationCoordinate2D coord,
                            string t, string s) : base()
   {
      _coordinate=coord;
      _title=t; 
      _subtitle=s;
   }
}

and this MKMapViewDelegate implementation

public class MapViewDelegate : MKMapViewDelegate
{
   private AppDelegate _appd;
   public MapViewDelegate (AppDelegate appd):base()
   {
      _appd = appd;
   }
   /// 
   /// When user moves the map, update lat,long text in label
   /// 

   public override void RegionChanged 
                        (MKMapView mapView, bool animated)
   {
      Console.WriteLine("Region did change");
      _appd.labelCurrent.Text = "Map Center " 
         + mapView.CenterCoordinate.Latitude + ", " 
         + mapView.CenterCoordinate.Longitude;
   }
   /// 
   /// Seems to work in the Simulator now
   /// 

   public override MKAnnotationView GetViewForAnnotation 
                    (MKMapView mapView, NSObject annotation)
   {
      var anv = mapView.DequeueReusableAnnotation("thislocation");
      if (anv == null)
      {
         Console.WriteLine("creating new MKAnnotationView");
         anv = new MKPinAnnotationView(annotation, "thislocation");
      }
      else 
      {
         anv.Annotation = annotation;
      }
      anv.AnimatesDrop = true;
      anv.PinColor = MKPinAnnotationColor.Green;
      anv.CanShowCallout = true;
      return anv;
   }
}

This Stack Trace (below) is what you'll see in MonoDevelop when using the Simulator - upload to the device to get it working (or if you are using the trial version, you may have to wait for an update to MonoTouch). UPDATE:fixed in MonoTouch 1.1

  at (wrapper managed-to-native) MonoTouch.UIKit.UIApplication.UIApplicationMain (int,string[],intptr,intptr) <0x00004>
  at (wrapper managed-to-native) MonoTouch.UIKit.UIApplication.UIApplicationMain (int,string[],intptr,intptr) 
  at MonoTouch.UIKit.UIApplication.Main (string[],string,string) 
  at MonoTouch.UIKit.UIApplication.Main (string[]) 
  at MapKit01.Application.Main (string[]) 
  at (wrapper runtime-invoke) .runtime_invoke_void_object (object,intptr,intptr,intptr) 
Native stacktrace:
 0   MapKit01          0x00092d1a mono_handle_native_sigsegv + 266
 1   MapKit01          0x00006f3a mono_sigsegv_signal_handler + 298
 2   libSystem.B.dylib 0x90b25b9b _sigtramp + 43
 3   ???               0xffffffff 0x0 + 4294967295
Debug info from gdb:
warning: Trying to remove a section from the ordered section list that did not exist at 0x2d4000.

MonoTouch MapKit 102

2009-09-25T20:57:00.006+10:00

UPDATE 27-Sep:MapKit 103 has the MKAnnotation working - DEVICE ONLY.

Thanks to Geoff and a bit of ObjC sample code I've figured out a little bit more of MapKit with MonoTouch. MKPlacemarks now appear (although I'm still working on MKAnnotation).

The main changes from MapKit 101 are:

FoundWithPlacemark
Now calls the *Object method added by Geoff.
_appd.mapView.AddAnnotationObject(placemark);

MapViewDelegate
Updated to pass the annotation into the constructor of MKPinAnnotationView and also set the properties for animation, color and showing the callout when clicked.

public override MKAnnotationView GetViewForAnnotation
                 (MKMapView mapView, NSObject annotation)
{
  Console.WriteLine("get view MKAnnotation "+annotation);
  var anv = mapView.DequeueReusableAnnotation("thislocation");
  if (anv == null)
  {
     Console.WriteLine("creating new MKAnnotationView");
     anv = new MKPinAnnotationView(annotation, "thislocation");
  }
  else
  {
     anv.Annotation = annotation;
  }
  anv.AnimatesDrop = true;
  anv.PinColor = MKPinAnnotationColor.Green;
  anv.CanShowCallout = true;
  return anv;
}

Hopefully I can figure out the MKAnnotation issue too...

#ScottGuAnnouncement : WebsiteSpark (free IIS7)

2009-09-24T19:47:00.007+10:00

There was certainly a lot of 'buzz' about #ScottGuAnnouncement on Twitter... although I'm not sure it has lived up to the hype...

Seems like the main announcement was 'BizSpark-lite' - WebsiteSpark - which lowers the cost barrier to small companies 'starting out' with Microsoft. Meh.

More interesting (to me) was Web Platform Installer v2... I don't know whether it already did this - but there is now the ability to install IIS7 very easily. If this has been around for ages without me realizing, all I can say is "d'oh".

So should we now just use IIS7 with Visual Studio 2008/10? Is Cassini dead?

p.s. not sure what to make of this announcement: "Microsoft Silverlight to run on Moblin devices"? And Microsoft has let Novell toil away on Moonlight why?

Silverlight mapanimation

2009-09-20T21:24:00.005+10:00

Taking a small break from MonoTouch to update RaceReplay.net.

Click to view each image

or if you already have Silverlight, watch the animations of today's Sydney Running Festival

Missing MonoTouch?
To get your MonoTouch fix for the day, I recommend the following screencasts by Brent Schooley:

Getting Started with MonoTouch - installing the pre-requisites and building 'Hello World'
UITabBarController - a two-parter that contrasts the same sample application being built in Objective-C/XCode and C#/MonoTouch.

Highly recommended.

MonoTouch Info.plist & Default.png

2009-09-18T19:14:00.017+10:00

I'm the first to admit this is a somewhat lazy post... but hey it's Friday. There's not a lot of MonoTouch-C#-specific content today - but .NET developers coming to the iPhone might not be aware of this stuff, so here goes:

Default.png
AKA "Splash screen", if you place a file named Default.png in the root of your application with Build action: Content then the iPhone will automatically display this while the application loads (rather than the "black screen").
There's a few approaches you can take: the awesome Flight Control app uses a simple 'Please wait' banner (which conveniently prompts you to turn the phone sideways); my other sample uses a 'greyed out' copy of its UI with a 'loading...' message.

Alternatively you could take a screenshot before shut-down and save it as /Name.app/Default.png, so the next time it starts up it looks like you are continuing where you left off - even before the app is finished loading. UPDATE: here's some sample screenshot code to add to your WillTerminate method

Info.plist
Whether you realise it or not, your MonoTouch app already contains an Info.plist file - right-click on your project → Options → iPhone Application → Application Bundle - these fields all end up in a MonoTouch-generated Info.plist.

If you navigate with Finder to /Projects/<your project>/bin/iPhone/debug/ and remove the .app extension you can open your 'app' (it's just a folder!) then you can view the generated Info.plist that is sent to your device.

That doesn't mean you are restricted from adding more details though! Remember that plist files are basically just a special 'Apple' form of XML. Simply add a text file to the root of your project and rename it Info.plist - MonoTouch will merge it with the Options before copying to the simulator/device. Here is a sample Info.plist (described below). DON'T FORGET to set the Build action:Content in the file's properties.

SBUsesNetwork & UIRequiresPersistentWiFi
Indicates to the operating system that your app uses connectivity. The Persistent setting keeps the WiFi running (so beware of running down the battery).

UIPrerenderedIcon
When true it tells the operating system that your icon is already pretty, and not to mess with it! When false the icon is made shiny with curved corners for you.

You probably want to leave it as the default: false!

UIStatusBarHidden
If true, totally HIDES the status bar (eg. for games such as Flight Control).

UIStatusBarStyle
Use this to turn the status bar from grey to black! The UIPrerenderedIcon example above also shows the UIStatusBarStyleOpaqueBlack status bar style.

UIInterfaceOrientation
If you change this from the default setting (eg. to UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight) you should ensure you have provided landscape views in your application. You really don't want this effect:

CFBundleURLTypes
If you read about initiating a call or other actions in MonoTouch you'll know about the use of OpenURL schemes to open other applications.

Using CFBundleURLTypes in Info.plist informs the operating system of what schemes your application will respond to. If you use the sample Info.plist and view this blogpost on your iPhone, clicking initdial://123456789 will open your app! You probably also want to parse the parameters... but that's another post :)

Custom schemes are really useful for social apps (eg. twitter clients, map stuff, etc). To learn more about what schemes are already available/used check out handleopenurl.com.

There are many more options you can set in Info.plist, and also other ways to control some of the things above (such as showing/hiding and changing the appearance of the status bar). Check out some of the Objective-C resources and try them for yourself!

MonoTouch released

2009-09-14T21:30:00.005+10:00

MonoTouch 1.0 has been released and is available for purchase!

Phonebook sample updated

Thank's to Simon's Build a Customer UITableViewCell post the Corporate Phonebook sample has been updated: now featuring custom UITableViewCells (and the phonenumbers don't overflow any more). Read more in the previous post.

The project can be downloaded (29Kb) to try out on your newly registered copy of MonoTouch! Maybe having the company phonebook on the iPhone will help convince your employer to spring for an Enterprise licence :)

MonoTouch with SQLite "Corporate Phonebook"

2009-09-11T21:01:00.006+10:00

Firstly, let me begin by saying this sample totally relies on the contribution of Frank Krueger who posted the SQLClient.cs code to the MonoTouch mailing list

Here is the code. Consider it released into the public domain. If there's interest, I can start a Google code project or something.

Many thanks Frank! This is a VERY simple application using that library: it lists 'employees' from an SQLite database and allows you to call or email them:
*
* note: may not adhere to iPhone user interface guidelines!

The c# code itself can be downloaded (26Kb) or browsed below:

This first sample only reads from SQLite on the iPhone - just a single database call

using (var db = new SQLiteClient.SQLiteConnection("phonebook")) {
   db.Open();
   var users = db.Query(
      "SELECT Firstname, Lastname, Work, Mobile, 
      Department, Email 
      FROM Phonebook ORDER BY Lastname"
   , 1000);
   listData = users.ToList();
}

which queries data that was set-up in the SQLite Database Browser and included with the application as a 'Content' file within the MonoTouch project.

It uses UITableViewDelegate, UITableViewDataSource and UIAlertViewDelegate implementations to populate the scrolling list and react to touch 'events'.

When you touch a row, we use the OpenUrl method discussed previously to trigger a call or email.

Future additions to this sample might include alphabetized sections, search function and a proper 'user page' rather than using UIAlertView. Perhaps some hierarchical navigation and an online 'updater' function as well?

p.s. yes, I shouldn't have used INTEGER for the telephone numbers in SQLite... they seem to be overflowing. I will convert them to TEXT in a future post..

MonoTouch MapKit 101

2009-09-06T19:46:00.010+10:00

UPDATE 27-Sep:MapKit 103 has the MKAnnotation working - DEVICE ONLY.
UPDATE 25-Sep:MapKit 102 has the MKPlacemark working.
UPDATE 14-Sep:This post was written against MonoTouch beta 0.8; some issues have been addressed in the released version. Updated blog post coming soon...

MapKit seems to have the following 'features' which were supposed to be covered by this sample:
• Display a map
• Change map appearance
• Interact with the user's location via GPS
• Reverse-geocode a location
• Place pins (with popups) on the map

The sample manages to cover four out of five of those, but pin-placement just refused to work...

Firstly, you can download the MapKit.zip (16Kb) if you want to give it a try or just view Main.cs and MainWindow.xib.designer.cs.htm online.

To start with, don't forget you will need using MonoTouch.MapKit; using MonoTouch.CoreLocation; in your c#.

Some of the 'code highlights' are shown below - I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it, just that it "works" (and if you have any ideas why MKAnnotation is so problematic, let me know).

Show current location
Actually this sample doesn't use MapKit's built-in feature to put a little blue pin on your current position, but it is VERY easy to configure:

mapView.ShowsUserLocation = true;

Change map location
It's also pretty easy to set the map's current center-point (and optionally animate the transition):

mapView.SetCenterCoordinate(new CLLocationCoordinate2D(
                 Convert.ToDouble(textfieldLatitude.Text),
                 Convert.ToDouble(textfieldLongitude.Text)), 
                 true);

Respond to map being 'dragged'
When the map is dragged, a MKMapViewDelegate subclass is provided to 'listen' for various things and take some action. The MapViewDelegate class takes a reference to the AppDelegate so it can interact with the UI.
Firstly you must 'attach' the delegate (NOTE: this is NOT a c# delegate but a different concept with the same name!)

mapView.Delegate = new MapViewDelegate(this);

and then do our UI update in the class itself

public class MapViewDelegate : MKMapViewDelegate
{
  public override void RegionChanged(MKMapView mapView, bool animated)
  {
    Console.WriteLine("Region did change");
    _appd.labelCurrent.Text = "Map Center " + 
        mapView.CenterCoordinate.Latitude + ", " + 
        mapView.CenterCoordinate.Longitude;
  }

Reverse geocoding a location
MKReverseGeocoder follows the same delegate pattern as MKMapView, first you 'configure' the geocoder

geoCoder = new MKReverseGeocoder(mapView.CenterCoordinate);
geoCoder.Delegate = new GeoCoderDelegate(this);
geoCoder.Start();

then provide the implementation in another class. In this case MonoTouch.MapKit does not currently provide the method we need, so here is the full class with special MonoTouch attributes included (meaning the c# name FoundPlacemark is not important - just make sure you get the parameters correct)

public class GeoCoderDelegate : MKReverseGeocoderDelegate
{
    AppDelegate _appd;
    public GeoCoderDelegate(AppDelegate appd) {_appd = appd;}
    // Not currently exposed by MonoTouch, use ExportAttribute
    [Export("reverseGeocoder:didFindPlacemark:")]
    public void FoundPlacemark(MKReverseGeocoder geocoder
                             , MKPlacemark placemark)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Found in " + placemark.Country);
        _appd.labelPlacemark.Text = placemark.SubThoroughfare
                            + " " + placemark.Thoroughfare
                            + " " + placemark.Locality
                            + " " + placemark.AdministrativeArea
                            + " " + placemark.Country;
    }

GPS Tracking with CoreLocation
You can spot the CoreLocation classes with their CL prefix (as opposed to MK). Once again we have the 'delegate pattern' in play, first creating it with some custom constructor parameters (and not forgetting to start the tracking)

locationManager = new CLLocationManager();
locationManager.Delegate = new LocationManagerDelegate(mapView, this);
locationManager.StartUpdatingLocation();

with the implementation in another class

private class LocationManagerDelegate : CLLocationManagerDelegate
{
    private MKMapView _mapview;
    private AppDelegate _appd;
    public LocationManagerDelegate(MKMapView mapview, AppDelegate appd)
    {
        _mapview = mapview; _appd = appd;
    }
    public override void UpdatedLocation(CLLocationManager manager
        , CLLocation newLocation, CLLocation oldLocation)
    {
        MKCoordinateSpan span = new MKCoordinateSpan(0.2, 0.2);
        MKCoordinateRegion region = 
           new MKCoordinateRegion(newLocation.Coordinate, span);
        _appd.mylocation = newLocation;
        _mapview.SetRegion(region, true);
        _appd.labelInfo.Text = "UserLocation " 
           + newLocation.Coordinate.Latitude + ", " 
           + newLocation.Coordinate.Longitude;
        Console.WriteLine("Location updated");
    }

You can stop it when you are done 'tracking', and you can also set locationManager.DesiredAccuracy (if you can figure out what the CONST values need to be!).

Here's the class diagram (the three delegates are actually nested in AppDelegate, as is a subclass of MKAnnotation which isn't working just yet...)

And yes, the user-interface on this sample isn't exactly intuitive... so here's the "manual" :)

Initiate a call with MonoTouch

2009-09-04T06:59:00.006+10:00

Initiating calls, text messages and triggering other applications on the iPhone is a pretty basic requirement for MonoTouch applications - but it still took me a little while to "translate" the examples I found (eg developertips).

The mechanism is pretty simple - you just need to construct a Url with a specific 'scheme' and call the OpenURL method. I kept finding examples using self to reference OpenURL so it took me a second to figure out the method is actually on UIApplication. I'm working with iPhone OS 3.0 so OpenURL returns a bool if the action is 'possible': false if that scheme is not recognised on the device.

public partial class AppDelegate : UIApplicationDelegate
{
    public override bool FinishedLaunching(UIApplication app, NSDictionary options)
    {
        window.MakeKeyAndVisible();
        buttonCall.TouchDown += delegate { // trigger action
            NSUrl url = new NSUrl("tel:" + textfieldInput.Text);
            if (!UIApplication.SharedApplication.OpenUrl(url))
            {
                var av = new UIAlertView("Not supported"
                    , "Scheme 'tel:' is not supported on this device"
                    , null
                    , "Ok thanks"
                    , null);
                av.Show();
            }
        };

* Note: you can read about the singleton SharedApplication property in the UIApplication reference.

Some of the other common schemes look like this:

new NSUrl("sms:" + textfieldInput.Text);
new NSUrl("http://maps.google.com/maps?q=" + textfieldInput.Text); // opens Maps
new NSUrl("http://" + textfieldInput.Text); // opens Safari
new NSUrl("mailto:you@gmail.com?subject=" + textfieldInput.Text);

and two others I've added for testing are

new NSUrl("tweetie:///post?message=" + textfieldInput.Text);
new NSUrl("comgoogleearth://");

You can view the full code for the test app - Main.cs and MainWindow.xib.designer.cs - the Xib is basically a textfield and seven buttons - complete source in MonoTouch solution ZIP (14k).

Here's a link to Apple's Url Scheme Reference (PDF)
and two lists of the currently available url types: iPhone Url Schemes & AppLookup

MonoTouch Settings.bundle

2009-08-30T21:39:00.007+10:00

Property Lists (plist) and Bundles are probably so obvious to seasoned Mac/iPhone developers that they're not even worth mentioning, however for someone with a '100% .NET' background you can't take anything for granted. I had a -lot-bit of trouble getting iPhone Settings working with MonoTouch (see here), but now that I've figured it out it seems very simple. Here's a quick guide:

1. Bundles are folders
Within your MonoTouch project, create a new folder (right-click solution → Add → New Folder) and call it Settings.bundle

2. Plist files are some sort of hybrid Xml key-value
(right-click solution → Add → New File... → Empty Text File) and call it Root.plist. You could add an existing plist-xml-formatted file if you like - but we're just going to create one from scratch (in the next step).

3. Edit Root.plist with the Property List Editor
The structure of the plist is very specific - look for some doco or Chapter 10 of Beginning iPhone Development. In this example I've only used PSGroupSpecifier and PSTextFieldSpecifier but there are many other types (PSMultiValueSpecifier, PSToggleSwitchSpecifier, PSChildPaneSpecifier...).
Double-click the Root.plist file inside MonoDevelop to open the Property List Editor - type carefully as there is no 'validation' and if you mis-spell (or mis-capitalize) something it just won't work:

4. Set the correct build action for Root.plist
This is important (and I think the cause of my earlier problem) - you MUST tell the IDE to make sure this file is copied to the phone.

5. Access the settings
Use the NSUserDefaults.StandardUserDefaults property to access the values set by the user.

6. See/Edit "Settings" on the iPhone

It's worthwhile noting that the 'useability' for these kinds of Settings is 'unusual' for desktop applications, but probably familiar to iPhone users... the settings for a whole swag of unrelated applications are grouped under the Settings icon (it's not necessarily obvious from with the application that they are available). The user must also quit the application to get to these settings - which means they're most useful for things that don't change much (eg. the users identity and servers in the Mail.app).

MonoTouch "iSOFlair"

2009-08-27T22:13:00.008+10:00

UPDATE: 6-Oct version 2.0 adds some functionality and the source code.

I didn't get as far as I'd have liked with today's MonoTouch app - a pretty basic rendering of your 'score' on stackoverflow.com (via their 'flair' feature). Yep, definitely not a 'practical' application.

The main goals were to play with WebClient, the 'filesystem' and then to get a multi-page/view app working with proper Settings (to configure the various stackoverflow variants). As you can see from the screenshots below I only got half-way there...

Here's the code: Main.cs, MainWindow.xib.designer.cs and root.plist. At least the WebClient for text and images worked well, as did saving and loading from the local file system. You'll have to excuse the dodgy Html parsing ;)

Unfortunately I've wasted a bit of time trying to figure out the Settings and how to get the plist setup correctly. I first created a folder in MonoDevelop called Settings.bundle with the root.plist inside. It has to be "partly" correct because the application now appears in the Settings menu - which it wasn't before - BUT when you select it the screen is empty of inputs :-(
I'm probably missing something really basic - the root.plist file is shown in the editor below:

Anyway, I'll do some more reading and try again tomorrow!

Obligatory Interface Builder screenshot...

MonoTouch "Restaurant Bill Splitter"

2009-08-26T21:50:00.005+10:00

Okay - my first "real" iPhone via MonoTouch beta application is complete... welcome to Restaurant Bill Splitter, the easiest way to determine who pays the check :-)

Here it is before any data entry and after you have entered the total restaurant bill (plus the subtotal of any alcohol in that figure) and chosen the number of drinkers versus non-drinkers who are going to pay.

Here is the Interface Builder screen shot

You can also download the MonoTouch BillSplitter solution (11Kb) and view the c# code for Main.cs and MainWindow.xib.designer.cs. Even though MonoTouch is currently still in (closed) beta, it is VERY cool to be able to write c#/.NET targetting the iPhone platform. There is still quite a bit to get my head around (mostly the Apple stuff: XIBs, Views, delegates, events, Interface Builder, etc) but hopefully once I get the hang of it, much more complex applications will be forthcoming...

NOTE: there is one known bug in there... I'm having trouble making the keyboard disappear when you press the [Done] button - so if you're wondering what all the ResignFirstResponder() delegates are for, it's my attempt to debug/fix the keyboard problem. That is also the reason for the [Split] button, which otherwise wouldn't really be required since the calculations happen 'on change' for each of the input controls...

UPDATE: this is the class diagram for the app (obviously excludes stuff *in* the XIB, but includes the .xib.designer.cs). I've also posted the class diagrams for Foundation and UIKit online.

MonoTouch "Hello World"

2009-08-25T21:53:00.004+10:00

First, let me say that this is the MonoTouch team's "Hello World" code. I'm still trying to figure this whole MonoTouch thing out, so I've given @redth's YouTube screencast a try, and posted my own screenshots (even though they look a lot like these)...

Massive thanks for @redth for the screencast - hopefully I'll be posting something of my own creation very soon. It made a lot more sense (more quickly) than reading.

Anyway, here's the quick links:

0. Read "Hello World" on the MonoTouch official site

1. Watch @redth's screencast

2. Check out my screenshots
Here are a couple of them...

Parsing XML with PHP4

2009-08-19T20:57:00.003+10:00

PHP is not something I'm familiar with, but I was recently helping out a friend and was surprised how difficult it was to find some sample code for downloading/parsing an XML (specifically using PHP4, apparently PHP5 has some built-in functionality).

Thankfully I stumbled across Taha Paksu's SimpleXML for PHP4 - you must join/login to download it, but it's worth it.

Once you have downloaded the ZIP file, place simplexml.class.php in your PHP 'app', and use the supplied example test.php to ensure everything is working:

<?
require_once "simplexml.class.php";

echo "<pre>";
$file = "http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/track/?query=metallica&type=xml";
$sxml = new simplexml;
$data = $sxml->xml_load_file($file);
print_r($data);
?>

which prints out a 'tree view' of the XML data.

If that works, you can then address individual elements (say your XML looks like this - an example from the download)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<note>
 <to>Tove</to>
 <from>Jani</from>
 <heading>Reminder</heading>
 <body>
  <format>text</format>
  <content>Don't forget me this weekend!</content>
 </body>
</note>

then your PHP might look like this:

<?
require_once "simplexml.class.php";

$file = "http://SOMESERVER.com/example.xml";
$sxml = new simplexml;
$data = $sxml->xml_load_file($file);
?>
<html>
<body>
<table>
<td>to:</td><td><?php echo $data->to; ?></td>
<td>sender:</td><td><?php echo $data->from; ?></td>
<td>subject:</td><td><?php echo $data->heading; ?></td>
<td>message:</td><td><?php echo $data->body->content; ?></td>
</table>
</body>
</html>

You can read more in the SimpleXML for PHP4 forum... That's enough PHP for now - back to c#/t-sql/xaml/html/javascript... and hopefully soon MonoTouch!

When Mono "just works" - Searcharoo 'ported'

2009-08-15T16:41:00.004+10:00

Decided to have another play with Mono today, in preparation for MonoTouch to come out of beta (or for my beta-participation to be approved)...

It was very easy to install Mono and MonoDevelop on my Mac, and because MonoDevelop supports Visual Studio 2008 solution files the current release of Searcharoo opened straight away*, compiled and could be tested with the 'provided' XSP2 webserver:

* I removed the Silverlight project from the Searcharoo solution (playing with Moonlight is a project for another day), but the Silverlight XAP from my Windows machine runs happily on the Mac against the Mono-version of the website:

The other cool thing about MonoDevelop is that it already supports the iPhone/MonoTouch 'project types'. You can't compile/test/run anything (you need MonoTouch.Foundation and MonoTouch.UIKit which are in 'private beta'), but you can browse the MonoTouch Samples - so at least you can see what C# code for the iPhone looks like. Fingers crossed Miguel and the team release the bits publicly ASAP :-)

City2Surf 2009 on RaceReplay.net with Flickr

2009-08-12T22:06:00.005+10:00

The world's "largest timed footrace" - Sydney's City2Surf - is now viewable on RaceReplay.net thanks to Silverlight and BingMaps.

There are two 'new' features:

1) Flickr photo integration (try it)

Using the Flickr photo search API, the Silverlight client renders small pink-and-blue dots for photos that are both geo-tagged and tagged:"city2surf". Clicking on the dot will open the Flickr page.

2) Visualizing the entire race (try it)

It is (unfortunately) impossible to animate the 65,000 or so points that would represent every runner and walker taking part in the event. By aggregating the finishers into timebands (and using both size & opacity to represent 'value') you can get some idea of the distribution of participants over time, over the course.

Add yourself!

As always, you can search for and add more 'runners' to the animation. Start typing a name into the autocomplete box, select from the list (optionally choose a color from the color-picker) and click Add runner.

Seadragon - Deep Zoom on Demand

2009-08-01T10:12:00.004+10:00

Microsoft LiveLabs just announced the release of Seadragon.com, an Azure-based service that creates hosted DeepZoom images 'on demand', making it super-easy to share very-high-resolution images with a quick link.

I tried it out with a few images from my Flickr account (they only take a minute or two to 'process')... click the links to play with Seadragon, click the images just to see a larger copy

Sydney skyline 9774 x 2154 (21 megapixels)

Seattle suburbs from the Space Needle 11991 x 2186 (26 megapixels)

Here's a few more to try for yourself:

Sydney at night 2048 x 768 (1.6 megapixels)

Pike Place Farmers Market 5273 x 2309 (12 megapixels)

Space Needle and Mt Rainier 6388 x 2366 (15 megapixels)

Seattle waterfront from the Space Needle 8861 x 2062 (18 megapixels)

Pike Place close-up 11323 x 3026 (34 megapixels)

As LiveLabs mentions on their website - an easy way to add hi-res images to your eBay listing, real-estate website, ecommerce store, blog, etc...

SQL in Silverlight

2009-07-12T16:46:00.008+10:00

It never ceases to amaze me how short my attention span has become...

what was I saying :) ?

Aaanyway, I sat down in front of my PC today planning to accomplish a few different things... but before that I had to catch up on blogs and twitter. A tweet caught my eye

"Great idea" I thought... but seemed like quite a big job and certainly not something I have the time to tackle. Then I started to recall seeing a C# port of an SQL engine (ages ago) and thought it might be fun to have a poke around. At least it would be easier to port something already in .NET land.

A couple of Google results later, I came across Sharp HSql, a circa 2001 port of the Java-based hsqldb (licence). The code was subsequently added to Codeplex with the following warning: This version is not ready for production grade applications. More testing is needed and some important bugs has to be fixed before that. You are warned.

Long story short...

it's a couple of hours later and I've done nothing that I'd planned to, but here is an 'alpha' of SharpHSql for Silverlight (try it out) - there's some test SQL at the bottom of the post.

The "port" mainly consisted of:

'implementing' ArrayList and Hashtable (umm, can you say List<object> and Dictionary<object, object>)
removing the 'Provider' and all the dependencies on System.Data that work fine in the full framework, but are missing from Silverlight (would be nice to add some sort of wrapper back in...)
converting FileInfo and related operations to IsolatedStorageFileStream (still some persistence testing to do...)
breaking DateTime handling (for now)

The REAL work was all done by Mark Tutt so don't get the idea that I'm taking any credit - all the goodness is his, any errors are mine.

The full source of the consuming Silverlight app is this Page.xaml and Page.xaml.cs; the full Visual Studio 2008 project ZIP (199Kb) is available to download. Anywhere I've touched the code you'll find a //HACK: tag!

Disclaimer: I've no idea if this is fit for any purpose at all... it seems to be able to DROP and CREATE tables, INSERT rows and SELECT/JOIN - but even that could be a fluke. Try it out at your own risk; leave a comment if you find something good or bad. Have fun!

UPDATE: the output is a lot prettier (try it) with the Silverlight DataGrid and Vladimir Bodurov's awesome dynamic datasource compiler - updated for generic types

(updated source (277Kb))

Test SQL

DROP TABLE IF EXIST "books";CREATE TABLE "books" ("id" INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, "name" char, "author" char, "qty" int, "value" numeric);

INSERT INTO "books" VALUES (1, 'Book000', 'Amy', 1, 23.5);
INSERT INTO "books" VALUES (2, 'Book001', 'Andy', 2, 43.9);
INSERT INTO "books" VALUES (3, 'Book002', 'Andy', 3, 37.25);
INSERT INTO "books" VALUES (4, 'Book 21', 'Amy', 99, 20.5);
INSERT INTO "books" VALUES (5, 'Book 22', 'Andy', 2, 903.9);
INSERT INTO "books" VALUES (6, 'Book 23', 'Andy', 5, 0.25);

SELECT * FROM "books" ORDER BY "value"

DROP TABLE IF EXIST "author";CREATE TABLE "author" ("name" char NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, "country" char);

INSERT INTO "Author" VALUES ('Andy', 'UK');
INSERT INTO "Author" VALUES ('Amy', 'USA');

SELECT * FROM "author" ORDER BY "value"

SELECT * FROM "books" LEFT JOIN "author" ON "author"."name" = "books"."name"

CREATE TABLE "clients" ("id" int NOT NULL IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY, "DoubleValue" double, "nombre" char, "photo" varbinary, "created" date );
INSERT INTO "clients" ("DoubleValue", "nombre", "photo", "created") VALUES (1.1, 'NOMBRE')
SELECT * FROM "clients"

Silverlight 3.0 - can't upgrade Runtime without DevTools?

2009-07-10T19:41:00.004+10:00

Silverlight 3.0 has been RTW (Released To Web), so I rushed straight to Silverlight.net to install it. Because I'm a Silverlight developer, I already have Silverlight 2.0 and the Silverlight 2.0 Tools for Visual Studio installed (of course).

Silverlight.net immediately notices I'm "out of date" and suggests I install the latest version.

After the quick 4Mb download, the installation seems to be going well...

...until... oops, I can't upgrade the Runtime in browser if the Visual Studio developer tools are out-of-date (ie. for 2.0)??

I'll just click 'more information' to read more - oh wait, 404

At the moment it seems like you'll have to install the full Silverlight 3.0 Developer Tools just to view Silverlight 3.0 content (if you were previously developing for Silverlight 2.0).

Only problem is, Silverlight 3 Release Notes says

Silverlight 2 projects cannot be created with the Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008. To create Silveright 2 projects, uninstall the Silverlight 3 runtime and the Silverlight 3 Tools from Add or Remove Programs and re-install the Silverlight 2 Tools for Visual Studio 2008.

I'm not sure I want to force all my users to upgrade to Silverlight 3.0 right now - I don't wany my website to be the one that forces a 4Mb download until I really need it (ie. I start using 3.0 features). So... to keep developing on 2.0 (for now), I can't even view Silverlight 3.0 content?

Please - tell me I'm wrong and that I've missed something?

UPDATE: Thankfully, in a VirtualPC set aside for SL3.0, the tools happily uninstalled previous versions and enabled me to open, recompile and deploy my 3.0 beta stuff...

Here are some beta samples updated for RTW

Maps That Bend Upwards

PlaneProjection with DeepZoom tiles

Bing Maps Control with PlaneProjection

OutOfBrowser DeepZoom Tile Viewer - breaking change: remove the Deployment.ApplicationIdentity element from AppManifest.xml and use the right-click+Properties to setup Out-of-Browser (creates a new OutOfBrowserSettings.xml file you)

iPhone OS 3.0 - Safari Geolocation

2009-06-18T22:13:00.005+10:00

Having installed iPhone OS 3.0 today, the first thing I wanted to play with (after MMS and Copy/Paste) was the Safari Geographical Location support.

The best example code I found was this iPhone 3.0 geolocation javascript API example... however for some reason the Google 'static map' images wouldn't work for me. I'm not 100% sure why (since the blog post appears to show it working) - but Safari on the iPhone does handle http://maps.google.com URLs in a special way (at least it does if they're anchor/links, in which case it triggers the Maps application).

Anyway, since I was keen to get "something" working, I Googled a basic 'image passthrough proxy' - which seemed to fix the problem.

The HTML and javascript is very simple (it's repeated from here).

function handler(location) {
    var message = document.getElementById("message");
    var loc = location.coords.latitude + "," + location.coords.longitude;
    message.innerHTML = "<img src='MapImageHandler.aspx?centerPoint="+ loc +"' />";
    message.innerHTML+="<p>Longitude: " + location.coords.longitude + "<br />";
    message.innerHTML+="Latitude: " + location.coords.latitude + "<br />";
    message.innerHTML += "Accuracy: " + location.coords.accuracy + "</p>";
}
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(handler);

The MapImageHandler.aspx code is also very short (and was sourced from here).

That's about the most basic geolocation sample you could... now to find something useful to do with it! Thanks to the two authors of the code I stitched together (blog.bemoko.com and guy off CodeProject).

Customizing Bing (on your site)

2009-06-17T21:05:00.001+10:00

It's fairly easy to create a site-specific, bing-powered search box, using the basic wizard at www.bing.com/siteowner.

However, it turned out to be less obvious how to 'customize' it's behaviour... specifically I wanted the search to search 'sites in Australia' by default. The final result is shown below, and you can try it here

Working with Advanced Queries in the Windows Live Search Box provides some hints about how you can customize the javascript var WLSearchBoxConfiguration={...} which controls how the search box works.

By default it looks like this

var WLSearchBoxConfiguration=
{
"global":{
 "serverDNS":"www.bing.com",
 "market":"en-AU"
},
"appearance":{
 "autoHideTopControl":false,
 "width":600,
 "height":400,
 "theme":"Blue"
},
"scopes":[
 {
  "type":"web",
  "caption":"&#x57;&#x65;&#x62;",
  "searchParam":""
 }
]
}

which provides a simple web search. To force the search to be "only for sites from Australia" we needed to add a new scope with a searchParam set:

"searchParam":"loc:AU"

Restricting to a specific site/domain is more obvious:

"searchParam": "site:conceptdev.blogspot.com"

It ends up looking like this:

var WLSearchBoxConfiguration=
{
    "global":{
        "serverDNS":"www.bing.com",
        "market":"en-AU"
    },
    "appearance":{
        "autoHideTopControl":false,
        "width":600,
        "height":400,
        "theme":"Blue"
    },
    "scopes": [
        {
            "type": "web",
            "caption": "this site",
            "searchParam": "site:conceptdevelopment.net"
        }
        ,
        {
            "type": "web",
            "caption": "ConceptDev Blog",
            "searchParam": "site:conceptdev.blogspot.com"
        }
        ,
        {
            "type":"web",
            "caption":"&#x57;&#x65;&#x62;&#x20;&#x28;&#x41;&#x75;&#x73;&#x74;&#x72;&#x61;&#x6C;&#x69;&#x61;&#x29;",
            "searchParam":"loc:AU"
        }
        ,
        {
            "type":"web",
            "caption":"&#x57;&#x65;&#x62;&#x20;&#x28;&#x61;&#x6c;&#x6C;&#x29;",
            "searchParam":""
        }
    ]
}

It doesn't look like you need to worry too much about the ASCII-Hex encoding for simple characters (although if you want to encode them, there are plenty of tools).

How I read a resumé...

2009-06-10T09:40:00.003+10:00

I came across this graphic today - linked from a great post on How to apply for a professional job - and had to post a link to it. Many of the points are funny/humorous - generally because they're (kinda) true! All the ones about attention-to-detail in your CV are 100% spot-on.

Twitter spam=FAIL (UPDATE Customer Service=WIN)

2009-05-27T19:43:00.007+10:00

Update Nov-09: It's been a few months since I 'let off steam' with the post below. It sounds a bit over-the-top reading it now. Anyway, as you can see in the comments I was recently contact by the company directly and I couldn't be more impressed with how they handled my 'complaint'. That sort of honesty in customer service deserves another look. The remainder of the post reads 'as it was'.

In the normal course of tweeting today, I happened to post

Argh - moving an ASP.NET app that requires Crystal Reports for VS 2003... oh the humanity

Nothing special about that - I often complain about stuff on Twitter... but mostly programming and stuff, not specific products or companies (see When Word of Mouth Got a Permalink) so I was unprepared for what happened next...

W.T.F.!? Okay so Twitter is totally open and there are all sorts of search-bots BUT give-me-a-break with the crappy marketing line and unattended twitter account.

Phew now I feel better :-)

Microsoft Translator Widget

2009-05-14T21:28:00.004+10:00

The Microsoft Translator Widget has been popping up on various sites recently - and now some of mine...

ConceptDevelopment.net in Spanish

Geoquery2008.com in Japanese

It's difficult to tell how useful this will be - unless Google can 'discover' this content is available in other languages it will be difficult to attract foreign-language traffic to Translator-enabled sites. It's all client-side/script-driven, so Google isn't going to get any translated content under normal spidering conditions. Those who land on the content organically may find it helpful I suppose...
I wonder if Live Search does anything special for Translator sites?

Draw on Silverlight Virtual Earth Map Control

2009-05-12T21:01:00.003+10:00

There are a couple of different projects where I'd like to enable 'drawing' on a map (including RaceReplay.net) - this is a basic first-cut of drawing within the Microsoft VE Map Control.

Each click on the map will start/continue a line. The MouseLeave event is wired to start a 'new' line. Navigating the map (dragging/double-click zoom) also causes points to be drawn - obviously this needs some work...

The two files required to build it are Page.xaml and Page.xaml.cs, the key pieces of code being

private void VEMap_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)
{
    Map m = (Map)sender;
    Location l = m.ViewportPointToLocation(e.GetPosition(m));
    if (polyline == null)
        CreateNewPolyline(l);
    else
        polyline.Locations.Add(l);
}

and

private void CreateNewPolyline(Location startPoint)
{
    polyline = new MapPolyline();
    polyline.Stroke = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Red);
    polyline.StrokeThickness = 2;
    var lc = new LocationCollection();
    lc.Add(startPoint);
    polyline.Locations = lc;
    VEMap.Children.Add(polyline);
}

Simple, eh?

p.s. these are plain old straight lines - at the 'continent' level you might expect them to curve as though on a great-circle; I'm not too worried about implementing that right now since the target usage of my drawing is at a much "smaller scale"... however Geoquery2008 does draw great circle lines correctly...

Silverlight DataContractJsonSerializer Error

2009-05-09T20:50:00.005+10:00

Admittedly there is very little excuse for hand-crafting Json output these days, with libraries like Json.NET available, and WCF supporting Json natively. However, I was tweaking an existing ASPX page (that was actually rendering Xaml for a Silverlight 1.0 application) to turn it into a 'service' for Silverlight 2.0... and it seemed like the fastest way to do that was simply replace a whole pile of <s and >s with {}

I got some hints/reminders on how to Consume a JSON object in Silverlight, and found Jsonlint really helpful in tuning the output until it was valid Json.

Then I created a 'matching' object model in Silverlight C#

and wired up the OpenReadCompleted event using DataContractJsonSerializer

Everything LOOKED like it should work, so at first I was confused by this error message:
Unable to cast object of type 'System.Collections.Generic.List`1[System.Object]' to type 'System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[System.String,System.Object]'

After staring blankly at the code for a while, I finally realised where my Json had gone wrong -- at the very root of my Json response (see Jsonlint image above) I was "accidentally" wrapping the entire Json output with an unnecessary [] pair. I guess this meant the Deserializer was expecting to cast into a collection (albeit with a single element), but I was intending the root Json element to be a single object (to match my C# JsonCourse).

The simple fix was removing the enclosing [] so that my Json started off like this instead:

{
    "width": 800 ,
    "height": 600 ,
    "runners": [
        {
            "name": "mapcanberramarathon",
            "points": [

Lesson for tonight is to better understand the underlying Json representation before consuming it (or else use a library rather than hand-craft the output). Anyway now it is fixed RaceReplay.net 2.0 is that much closer to fruition...

Silverlight "Maps That Bend Upwards"

2009-05-02T18:12:00.007+10:00

I was inspired today by HERE & THERE's horizonless projection of Manhattan (via The Map Room: Maps that Bend Upwards).

Using Silverlight 3.0 beta and it's new PlaneProjection feature, I have hooked up three Silverlight Map Controls with different values for RotationX, GlobalOffsetY (vertical displacement) and GlobalOffsetZ (in/out of the page) to create a very crude 'interactive' version of their horizonless-map.

If you have Silverlight 3.0 beta installed, you can try out the Silverlight Virtual Earth Maps That Bend Upwards OR if you don't have the beta installed, you can watch a screencast.

[try it] [watch it]

I've noticed a little bit of weird behaviour on loading (sometimes the 'initial' map of New York doesn't load completely sync'd in all three panels), but after that it seems to work OK - it's just for fun after all.

ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC)

2009-04-26T17:38:00.009+10:00

Another 'link collection' (along the lines of my MVVM list)... about ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller)...

Chris Tavares' Building Web Apps without Web Forms	Chris explains the MVC concepts and in the process builds a simple wiki-like tool - great because it is a more 'real life application' type example than you'll see elsewhere.
Rob Conory on why You Should Learn MVC	Rob Conery's well-thought-out argument for giving ASP.NET MVC is a great read, with some classic quotes such as: WebForms is a lie. It’s abstraction wrapped in deception covered in lie sauce presented on a plate full of diversion and sleight of hand. Nothing you do with Webforms has anything to do with the web – you let it do the work for you. This, friends, is a big deal (at least to me): You’re working in a lie. The web is not stateful and works with this stuff called HTML sent across wires using another thing called HTTP – you need to know this, love this, and feel it at the bone level. He provides seven excellent reasons to back up his assertion (I'm paraphrasing the headings here, you should read the original text): Testability - yes, automated testing can be conducted much closer to your 'ui surface' without needing actual ui automation (ala WatiN et al) Control over Html - no 'funky' `id` munging or VIEWSTATE! Extensibility (my favourite so far - the Spark View Engine) Makes you think - and that's a good thing :) Javascript has 'come of age' Learn new concepts - what are those ALT.NET guys on about, anyway? It's fun!
Jeremy D. Miller's Oversimplified ASP.Net MVC Pros and Cons	To sum up: CON: ASP.NET MVC is a 'version 1' product - so be warned PRO: It's easy to customize and extend, to get around point #1 Simple eh?
The Book Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0	Written by the "fantastic four" (Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, Scott Guthrie), I can only imagine it's a good read since I haven't bought it (yet)... However, the first chapter by Scottgu(180+ pages) is a free download!, and you can view the sample app - nerddinner.com and download the code.
K. Scott Allen's MSDN article Life And Times of an ASP.NET MVC Controller	Introduces Routing, Controllers, Action/ActionResult and Helpers. AND 6 Tips for MVC Model Binding (and validation) - a hidden gem in the MVC framework!
Models inc	Slightly OT for a pure MVC post - applies to MVVM or any of the related patterns really - but I agree with the premise: Keep your system/tier/layer/whatever boundaries simple (DTOs) and if there is more application specific needs than a simple DTO can provide, then create an Application Model I guess that kinda leads into this discussion on creating View Models in MVC - I wondered about the "`IEnumerable` as the `Model` Type" in NerdDinner - Stephen discusses a 'proper' ViewModel approach too (see Listing 5 and 6 - although I'm not sure I'd put it in `*Controller.cs` necessarily).
Los Techies' Jimmy Bogard's How we do MVC	The 'voice of experience' from 9 months of MVC, including advice like: Thin (not FAT) Controllers Strongly-typed views, and discouraging the dictionary part of ViewData Distinct ViewModels (seperate from the domain) No magic strings receive the EditModel as an action parameter, not some collection object and my favourite advice: Use partials when you have common markup, and the data is in your top-level ViewModel object. Use RenderAction when you have common markup, but the information is orthogonal to the main concern of your view. Think like the "login widget" at the top of every screen. A filter is too much indirection for that scenario, RenderAction is very explicit. Also links to Jeremy D. Miller's "Opinions" on MVC which is full of more sage advice!
ASP.NET MVC - the website	Microsoft's 'official' MVC home page - download the bits, watch videos, download templates, download sample applications and link to many more useful blog posts than described above!
Videos	From Scottgu: File\|New → Company: Creating NerdDinner.com with ASP.NET MVC - watch an MVC app built from scratch ASP.NET MVC: Overview ASP.NET MVC: Ninja Black Belt Tips
MSDN documentation	If you must...
Prevent Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) using ASP.NET MVC’s AntiForgeryToken() helper	This is a 'specific feature' unlike many of the above links, but an important one IMO... Your application can be vulnerable to cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks not because you the developer did something wrong (as in, failing to encode outputs leads to XSS), but simply because of how the whole Web is designed to work. ALL developers of internet-accessible websites should be making themselves familiar with XSS/CSRF: how they work and how to protect against them. If this feature makes that easier/simpler using MVC... then that's probably another reason to use MVC!
Check out Stephen Walther's draft ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed book	Read the great draft chapters Stephen has generously posted on his blog, provide feedback and then buy the book!

UPDATED: Added How we MVC and MVC Thunderdome Principle. Both provide exactly the kind of real-world 'lessons learned' that I want to read before starting an MVC project - to know that others have experienced real-world problems, found real-world (and neat) solutions, and shared them. Now I'm free to go and make my own new mistakes :)

UPDATED: You should NOT use ASP.NET MVC if... lists some reasons why MVC may not be for you: "You rely on 3rd party vendor controls for lots of the UI" is a good one which may not be 'immediately obvious' to those looking at MVC for the first time.

Silverlight 3.0 PlaneProjection (with DeepZoom)

2009-04-18T12:17:00.006+10:00

I previously built a rather gratuitous PlaneProjection demo flipping around a Silverlight Map Control. A slightly more useful (or at least interesting) use of Silverlight 3.0 PlaneProjection is this Deep Zoom 'tile pyramid visualizer'...

[fullsize image] [try it out]

Rather than just play around with the RotationX and RotationY properties,

GlobalOffsetZ is used to 'push back' the larger images to sit 'behind' the smaller, foremost image
CenterOfRotation is set to GlobalOffsetZ * -1 so that all the images rotate around the same point
RotationY is then used to rotate them all together

Here are some diagrams to explain what that all means:

Firstly, each 'layer' in a Deep Zoom image is double the the size of the previous one (height/width) so when they three layers are rendered on top of each other, you can clearly see the size differences:

However when we apply the PlaneProjection to move the larger images along the Z axis (ie. in/out of the page) we can create the effect that all three images are the 'same size'.

Altering the PlaneProjection attributes listed about let's us zoom and rotate the pyramid to get a totally useless but kinda cool looking view of a Deep Zoom tile pyramid...

UPDATE: For those without Silverlight 3.0 installed, I've recorded (my first!) screencast demo (sorry it's in Flash - something to figure out another time...)

Re-blog: C# 4.0 feature focus (recommended)

2009-04-16T19:07:00.004+10:00

Of all the blogs I follow, the one I most often 'bookmark and re-read' is probably Bart De Smet's (ok, Scottgu too).

I think I first started following Bart in 2006 when I was learning about LINQ - A custom implementation of the .NET Standard Query Operators.

However it was this recent post on C# 4.0: Co- and Contra-Variance for Generic Delegate and Interface Types that prompted this 'recommendation'. It's a perfect example of what I like about many of his posts - I learned a lot! Some of the '3.0 examples' he mentions are just the sort of thing I've noticed, wondered about and worked around before: but Bart provides the "language" and "reasoning" that explains why... sure I've probably heard the terms co- and contra-variance before, and I can understand at some 'high level' why

IEnumerable<Person> people = from Student s in db.Students
                             where s.Age <= 25
                             select s;

doesn't (currently) work, but Bart's discussion and examples feel just like the 'developer watercooler' type conversation that might take place amongst developers at work - and suddenly I understand the concepts a lot better.

I enjoy reading (and re-reading, just to fully understand them!) Bart's posts, and highly recommend them.

Worst ecommerce website ever MkII

2009-04-14T20:39:00.007+10:00

I blogged about how bad IMG Ecommerce's Events Online ecommerce website was last year. It was therefore with some dismay that I had reason to use the same website again, and to find it just as bad one year on.

It starts off poorly with some truly poor UI design: a button group with no default and poor names:

progressing to bad/incomplete user feedback

awful button layout (and one-question-per-form dragging out the process)

only the breadcrumb gives a hint of what to do here

and the piece-de-resistance: TWO buttons labelled Payment!

What a joke of a website from IMG "the world's premier and most diversified sports, entertainment and media company".

Runner Up...

A close second in the abysmal ecommerce website stakes is the Easter Show online ticketing site.

Lowlights include:

you must type in a quantity AND PRESS PURCHASE - but that just updates the quantity (it doesn't actually purchase)
you must press COMPLETE ORDER when you are done. But if you enter a number in any box and press COMPLETE ORDER it will not recognise that input (back to step 1).
note the instructions at the bottom, which might as well say "DO NOT USE YOUR WEB BROWSER THE WAY YOU ALWAYS HAVE FOR EVERY OTHER WEBSITE EVER, or it'll be your fault when your order is screwed up"!

How do these things make it through user testing?

Polyline.StrokeLineJoin and tight corners

2009-04-07T20:43:00.005+10:00

Sharp corners in Polylines (particularly thick ones) can create unintended artefacts - particularly apparent when converting a (somewhat shaky) GPS track into a line on the Silverlight VE Map Control.

In this screenshot the circled 'line extension' (leading off into the water) is not actually part of the path, but an artefact of a very tight corner:

A few simple additions - StrokeLineJoin being the most important - and the Path looks "correct":

<m:MapPolyline 
Stroke="Blue" StrokeThickness="10" x:Name="Course"
StrokeLineJoin="Round"
StrokeEndLineCap="Round"
StrokeStartLineCap="Round"
Locations="-33.84780366140732,151.21159315109253 -33.84504135759562,151.2111210823059 -33.84418591636912,151.2106704711914 -33.84374037067171,151.21082067489624...
/>

Just something to be aware of...

*.MDF' cannot be opened because it is version 655. This server supports version 612 and earlier

2009-04-06T20:31:00.003+10:00

When I'm not playing with Silverlight and Virtual Earth, I've been figuring out MVC (thanks to Scott, Scott and Phil). However pretty early on I hit a weird error in Visual Studio 2008 when trying to 'open' a database via the Server Explorer:

The database 'C:\SOME\FOLDER\MYDATABASE.MDF' cannot be opened because it is version 655. This server supports version 612 and earlier. A downgrade path is not supported.

Background

I had created that database in Visual Studio 2008 (File → Add New Item → SQL Server Database) and now it wouldn't let me open it!

What I had done is opened, edited and closed the database file using SQL Server 2008 Management Studio. Shouldn't be a problem, right, since I'm also using Visual Studio 2008?

The Problem

Well, although I currently have SQL Server 2008 installed, I also have SQL Server 2005 (which was installed with Visual Studio 2008 originally). When I created the database originally I just assumed it was a SQL Server 2008 database - but it wasn't (it was 2005)!

Turns out that when you are create or open a file-based (.MDF) database (as opposed to using a database instance or server connection) Visual Studio needs some 'help' knowing what tools to use.

When I edited the *.MDF file in SQL Server 2008, it made some fundamental "changes" to the file (even though I didn't 'upgrade' it) which prevented SQL Server 2005 from opening it. Why was Visual Studio 2008 confused? It's a configuration setting!

To fix the problem, go to Tools → Options... → Database Tools → Data Connections and change the SQL Server Instance Name from whatever it was (probably a SQL Server 2005 instance) to your SQL Server 2008 instance, hit OK and you should be fine!

Thanks to simple-talk; and SQL 2008 Express edition error/Add new item on ASP.NET forms. A bit OT - HTH someone...

Silverlight VirtualEarth Map Control - with video

2009-04-06T20:18:00.006+10:00

Okay - I wasn't going to do any more Silverlight VE Map Control posts... this is definitely the last one! I found some videos on YouTube that I thought suited 'animating' a map so I gave it a try. These would work MUCH BETTER if I had Silverlight-encoded videos that I could sync to/control more easily: but you get the idea...

Sydney City2Surf

Sydney Marathon

p.s. YES I know it's dodgy to have to 'sync' the start of each element manually - but without lots of hassle figuring out if the YouTube video is loaded and running it was the easiest way to proof-of-concept...

Script diagrams using SQL Server 2008

2009-04-03T20:27:00.005+11:00

Originally this script was ScriptDiagram2005 (on CodeProject), based on a SQL Server 2000 version by Clay Beatty.

I had already tested the '2005' version on "Katmai" betas of SQL Server 2008 and it worked fine, so I hadn't bothered to update the script until I read
this thread (requires login) and learned of the built-in sys.fn_varbintohexstr function.

This made the previous custom function Tool_VarbinaryToVarcharHex redundant, so I have updated the code to ScriptDiagram2008. There isn't really any code to download - just view the script (copy/paste to an .SQL file to apply to your database).

Makes it easy to add your diagrams to source control - still figuring out how to fit it nicely into Visual Studio Team System Database Edition GDR...

Silverlight VirtualEarth Map Control - with animation MkII

2009-04-01T20:00:00.005+11:00

In recent posts I was working to get the new Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control (CTP) to:

display (pan/zoom) an <Image> overlay

display (pan/zoom) a <Path> line

animate a set of <Ellipse>s that also (pan/zoom)

animate the map center point to 'track' an <Ellipse>

Turns out this was all possible - there are two examples: New York Marathon and Sydney Half Marathon

Each problem was overcome as follows:

1. Use m:MapLayer.MapRectangle not Height/Width

Any "pixel-specific" measurements applied to the Image will intefere with your Map layout. DO NOT specify Height, Width, Canvas.Left, Canvas.Top - just give the NW and SE corners (latitude,longitude) of the geographic region the image should cover, like this:

<Image Source="map.png" m:MapLayer.MapRectangle="40.8325608405556,-74.1015908473376,40.5722860972124,-73.843755459154"...

2. Use m:MapPolyline not Path

Although it was possible to keep the Path inside a Canvas element and place it with MapRectangle, it did not scale well since the Path Data is effectively tied to pixel coordinates. It is possible to write code to manually scale the line, but it was much easier to re-express the line with points specified by Latitude,Longitude in a m:MapPolyline like this:
<m:MapPolyline Stroke="Red" Locations="-33.863502543277534,151.20294570922852...

3. Use m:MapLayer.Position and a custom attached property

Positioning the Ellipses was easy using m:MapLayer.MapPosition, however animating this property was a little tricky. MapPosition is of Type Location but the Latitude and Longitude properties are not easily accessible as the TargetProperty of an animation, so I needed to write custom attached properties and set them as the target in code.

<Ellipse Fill="#FFFF0000" Width="11" Height="11" m:MapLayer.MapPosition="-33.863502543277534,151.20294570922852" m:MapLayer.MapPositionMethod="Center"...

4. Use m:Map.Center and a custom (hacked) attached property

Making the Map 'viewport' itself animate proved slightly trickier again. I created another attached property (code for all properties here) for some reason only one 'axis' (Longitude) would animate.

When I removed the Longitude property, then the Latitude position would animate... but I could not get them both animating together. Figuring it was a timing issue, rather than try to "set" both properties when they Changed, Latitude gets stuffed into a static field and then set in the LongitudeChanged handler - seems to work but not sure if it's a good idea (obviously it would break if you tried to animate two maps at the same time!)

More info on the final example - no more Map Control posts for a while...

Silverlight VirtualEarth Map Control - with animation

2009-03-27T21:46:00.004+11:00

UPDATE: The Microsoft devs were right - it is possible (and not a bug). The 'complete' sample now keeps the image, course line and animated objects visible during all panning and zooming operations - try out
animation with Silverlight Virtual Earth Map Control!

I've made some progress with my first Silverlight Virtual Earth Map Control project...

Try it out (deprecated) latest

Here are some screenshots of the zoom/animation in action:

The code and xaml also online - I needed to (well, I think I needed to) use the ViewChangeEnd event to re-calculate various offsets and dimensions to keep the animation and overlay image sychronised with the Map Controls' zoom behaviour (even though panning worked without modification).

OpenSearch 'Visual Search'aroo (for IE8)

2009-03-25T22:32:00.005+11:00

About 6 months ago I added OpenSearch.xml to searcharoo.net.

Now that IE8 has been released there is a new "Visual Search" feature that can be enabled via opensearch.xml.

When you visit searcharoo.net, OpenSearch-supporting browsers will provide a visual indicator (eg. this colored arrow) that you can add that site as a Search Provider.

Choose to add Searcharoo.net...

...and tick the box that you want to use search suggestions

Once it is set-up, you will receive real-time feedback/results as you type your search!

I did have some problems implementing it, however. The original post I saw was using a beta, and the latest documentation Search Provider Extensibility in Internet Explorer and XML Search Suggestions Format Specification shows the XML required is slightly different.

This was the opensearch.xml file that actually worked for me:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:ie="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Search/2008/">
  <ShortName>Searcharoo.net</ShortName>
  <Image height="16" width="16" type="image/icon">http://www.searcharoo.net/favicon.ico</Image>
  <Url type="text/html" template="http://www.searcharoo.net/Search.aspx?searchfor={searchTerms}"/>
  <Url type="application/x-suggestions+xml" template="http://www.searcharoo.net/SearchSuggest.aspx?searchfor={searchTerms}"/>
  <ie:PreviewUrl type="text/html" template="http://www.searcharoo.net/SearchSuggest.aspx?searchfor={searchTerms}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

with the following added to the .master page

<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="/opensearch.xml" title="Searcharoo.net">

I'm still working on improving the output of the search, but you can view it's response to the browser using this URL - http://www.searcharoo.net/SearchSuggest.aspx?searchfor=manhattan (note the addition of xmlns). The XML also supports image/previews, so Searcharoo will need another upgrade to support that too..

MIX 10k entry goes OutOfBrowser

2009-03-23T21:32:00.008+11:00

I have updated my MIX 10k Challenge entry to Silverlight 3.0 so itcan run out-of-browser!

You can visit the Silverlight 3.0 version of exploDZ, and install it locally for yourself WARNING: will prompt to install Silverlight 3.0 which is in BETA

1. Right-click and choose to Install

2. Select "where" to install (this is really only where the shortcuts go)

3. Silverlight 3.0 having an out-of-browser experience

This is really only a test of Silverlight 3.0 - exploDZ was just a bit of fun, and there is already an ClickOnce/WPF version at DeepZoomPublisher.com/Viewer.

Code changes

Thanks to Chris' Silverlight 3.0 out-of-browser instructions the ONLY change from the 2.0 to the 3.0 (out-of-browser) version was the following element added to the AppManifest.xml file:

  <Deployment.ApplicationIdentity>
    <ApplicationIdentity
       ShortName="exploDZ"
       Title="Out of browser DeepZoom Viewer">
      <ApplicationIdentity.Blurb>
        exploDZ out-of-browser (Silverlight 3.0)
      </ApplicationIdentity.Blurb>
    </ApplicationIdentity>
  </Deployment.ApplicationIdentity>

What it does

The shortcut created by the 'installer' has a target like this:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\3.0.40307.0\sllauncher.exe" conceptdevelopment.net.0
I guess that parameter reflects the 'source site' and index of Silverlight OutOfBrowser apps -stored in a safe place somewhere :) stored in Apps\LocalLow\Microsoft\Silverlight\Offline\ (on Windows 7 at least).

The index.html ISN'T the hosting page from the internet - it's a custom Silverlight object tag:

The metadata file contains

LaunchPath=C:\Users\Craig\AppData\LocalLow\Microsoft\Silverlight\Offline\conceptdevelopment.net.0\index.html
SourceDomain=conceptdevelopment.net
OriginalUri=http://conceptdevelopment.net/silverlight3/outofbrowser01/exploDZ.zip
AppID=conceptdevelopment.net.0
Description=exploDZ out-of-browser (Silverlight 3.0)
Title=Out of browser DeepZoom Viewer
Name=exploDZ

How it works?

Who knows??? Tim's Silverlight 3 Out-of-browser Update Model overview is a worthwhile read.

Adobe's AIR out-of-browser host for Html-Javascript and Flash/Flex sits atop WebKit, and from the index.html above it seems likely that OutOfBrowser-Silverlight is also sitting in a little web browser of some description. It's only 500Kb, so it's not IE :) - and there also has to be a Mac version... it doesn't appear to be managed code (or I'd guess Cassini), maybe the Mac one is related to Chiron? Speaking of Mac - this is how it looks in Safari 4 beta...

Silverlight VirtualEarth Map Control - with DeepZoom Images

2009-03-23T07:05:00.002+11:00

"TagUpdater" parses through your Deep Zoom metadata.xml, opens the images and reads EXIF title/description/tag data... so it was pretty simple to extend it to read latitude & longitude.

The location of each Deep Zoom sub-image is then available to display on a map, in the Tag Browser sample:

1. Metadata.xml entries now look like this

  <Image>
    <FileName>C:\Dev\Cities\bhutan_tigersnest.jpg</FileName>
    <x>0</x>
    <y>0.127264287334191</y>
    <Width>0.199250151375691</Width>
    <Height>0.203911475380207</Height>
    <ZOrder>11</ZOrder>
    <Tag>bhutan</Tag>
    <Description>Amazing monastery perched on a cliff in Bhutan near Paro</Description>
    <Rating>0</Rating>
    <Title>Tiger's Nest</Title>
    <LatLong>27.4266666666667,89.4033333333333</LatLong>
  </Image>

2. We add a Silverlight VirtualEarth Map Control

xmlns:m="clr-namespace:Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapControl"
<m:Map x:Name="viewMap" Grid.Row="3" Height="220" Opacity="0.25" />

3. and in the code add a new MapLayer

MapLayer PinMapLayer = new MapLayer(); // Layer on map to 'add' stuff to [MAP]

viewMap.AddChild(PinMapLayer);

4. Then display the pins within the xmlClient_DownloadStringCompleted method (originally from Kirupa's sample)

//Now add to map [MAP]
if (latlongString != "")
{
var l = new Location(
    Convert.ToDouble(latlongString.Split(',')[0])
    , Convert.ToDouble(latlongString.Split(',')[1])
    );
Image pin = new Image();
pin.Source = new BitmapImage(new Uri("blue_pushpin.png", UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute));
pin.Stretch = Stretch.None;
var tooltipObject = new StackPanel();
var title = new TextBlock();
title.FontWeight = FontWeights.Bold;
title.Text = titleString;

tooltipObject.Children.Add(title);
var description = new TextBlock();
description.Text = descriptionString;
tooltipObject.Children.Add(description);

ToolTipService.SetToolTip(pin, tooltipObject);
// Adds the pushpin to the map layer.
PinMapLayer.AddChild(pin, l, PositionMethod.BottomCenter);
}

5. and in msi.MouseMove, move the map for the 'current' image

l = new Location(
            Convert.ToDouble(imageMetadata[subImageIndex].LatLong.Split(',')[0])
            , Convert.ToDouble(imageMetadata[subImageIndex].LatLong.Split(',')[1])
            );
viewMap.Opacity = 1;
viewMap.SetView(l, 12);

If you play with it it will be obvious there are some useability issues with changing the map 'on hover' over the images (it's difficult to get the mouse over to the map if you want to navigate around), but the Silverlight VirtualEarth Map Control definitely makes it easy to build!

Silverlight VirtualEarth Map Control - Search Results

2009-03-22T15:06:00.006+11:00

Try out a basic search results view using the Silverlight VirtualEarth Map Control at searcharoo.net/SilverlightMap.html...

Thanks to Chris Pietschmann's Tooltip example each pin shows what search result it refers too (although I still haven't figured out to make the pins 'click-able' to open the result link directly...).

The relevant code added to the search result JSON parsing:

1. Create a MapLayer
MapLayer PinMapLayer = new MapLayer();

2. Add it to the Map control first (ie. before adding Children)
ResultMap.AddChild(PinMapLayer);

3. Extract GPS location

var l = new Location(
    Convert.ToDouble(result.gps.Split(',')[1])
    , Convert.ToDouble(result.gps.Split(',')[0])
    );

4. Create the pin (Image), add tooltip and add to MapLayer

Image pin = new Image();
pin.Source = new BitmapImage(new Uri("blue_pushpin.png", UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute));
pin.Stretch = Stretch.None;

var tooltipObject = new StackPanel();
var title = new TextBlock();
title.FontWeight = FontWeights.Bold;
title.Text = result.name;
tooltipObject.Children.Add(title);
var description = new TextBlock();
description.Text = result.description;
tooltipObject.Children.Add(description);
ToolTipService.SetToolTip(pin, tooltipObject);

// Adds the pushpin to the map layer.
PinMapLayer.AddChild(pin, l, PositionMethod.BottomCenter);

The search box is pre-populated with manhattan which results in a set of photos.

Perform that search, then search for sydney to see how the VirtualEarth Silverlight Map Control animates between the two locations with nothing more than a simple call to SetView

ResultMap.SetView(GetMinMaxCenter(min, max), 12);

The complete code will be available on Searcharoo@Codeplex shortly.

p.s. another search to try is - pumpkin - geocoded photos are so cool!