Noise from the Basement

Are you passionate about software development and want to share your passion with others?  If so then the Edmonton .NET Users Group is looking for you. Specifically as the newly elected Program Director I’m looking for you to speak at one of our meetups.

Already a member?  That’s even better.  Don’t hold back, share with the group.

You don’t have be a world-renowned speaker.  In fact, the .NET Users Group is a friendly and supportive environment for first time speakers.  The biggest thing we ask for is passion and willingness to share your knowledge.

This is the 4th and final part about incorporating an objective-c library in Xamarin.  In my case I’m binding BEMCheckBox.  In part 3 we used Sharpie to create a C# interface for the BEMCheckBox.  In this post we will show how to use that interface. Finally you can find a working example of BEMCheckBox in Xamarin iOS here.

First take the APIDefinitions.cs and Structs.cs files in a location accessible to Visual Studio.  Also take the BEMCheckBox.framework folder and move this location accessible to Visual Studio.  For me this means moving the files to my Windows computer.

This is the 3rd part about using the BEMCheckBox, an Objective-C library, in Xamarin.  Part 1 described how to compile the BEMCheckBox library using Xcode.  Part 2 showed how to combine the multiple libraries we compiled from Part 1 into one library.  In this part I’ll describe how to use Sharpie to create the C# API interface.

Sharpie is a tool that reads the header files in the BEMCheckBox framework and extract a C# interface.  We could create the interface manually but it’s easier if we let technology do some of the work for us.  Don’t worry about this job being replaced by a robot as we will have to manually edit the file after it’s generated, at least for BEMCheckBox.  Download the sharpie tool here and read more about the sharpie here.

Transcript of my wife talking to my daughter’s grade 6 friend:

Wife: “What is your favourite cheese?”

Friend: “Grated!”

This is part 2 of creating a iOS Binding for the Objective-C Library BEMCheckBox.  In part 1 we compiled the Xcode project into two separate libraries.  One for iphones (ARM architecture) and one for iOS simulators (x86/x64 architecture).

In this post I’ll discuss how to combine two libraries into one that contains all the architectures.  If you fail to combine the libraries then you will get errors when you bind to Xamarin.  If you only have the iphone library then it won’t run on the simulator and vice versa.