How to use the ArcGIS iPhone SDK with MonoTouch

The iPhone is an amazing platform, yet coming for the .NET world, Objective C really makes me feel like I'm going back to the old days of C, now when Novell came out with MonoTouch I thought that I could do something with that.

I spent many years in Visual Studio and working in .NET, going to a Mac with XCode makes it a little hard, Novell started many years ago the Mono project an open source, cross-platform implementation of C# and the CLR that is binary compatible with Microsoft.NET. Mono provides you as well with a version of the Visual Studio for the Mac called MonoDevelop that will make the .NET developer feel better using a Mac or Linux. Those are open source and you can download them from their main page.

MonoTouch is the implementation of that library in the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad world, allowing developer to create C# based applications that runs on Apple’s iOS by binding on the native libraries. The best part is that, there is no JIT or interpreter shipped with your application, only native code when you deploy to the Apple AppStore as well as MonoTouch does not support VB.NET ;-)

Let’s get stated.

So I thought to give MonoTouch a chance. My test is going to be to use the native library created by ESRI to consume maps on the iPhone.  So I downloaded the Beta of the ArcGIS library for the iPhone 4.

Add the native library (.a) to the project just by  right click –> Add –> Add Files, select the library file and add it into the main directory of your project.

Read more: Al Pascual ASP.NET Blog

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