Cocoa 101 for C# developers – Dissecting SemanticMerge to learn Xamarin.Mac

Cocoa 101 for C# developers – Dissecting SemanticMerge to learn Xamarin.Mac

Monday, March 24, 2014 Pablo Santos dotnet , mono 0 Comments

As a C# developer on Windows and Mono, have you ever considered developing a full GUI for Mac using C#?

Getting used to the new ‘constraints’ (instead of anchors), the controls and a few other topics to get started is a very interesting experience.

We developed SemanticMerge for Mac using Xamarin.Mac and we learned a couple of things along the way that we’re now sharing with everyone. Basically we started dissecting SemanticMerge to explain how it was built.

• Part 1 covers why we decided to go for C# instead of Objective-C and why we prefer a native toolkit better than a generic one (like Qt).
• Part 2 is a very light intro to Mono.Mac
• Part 3 covers an interesting topic: should you create the controls in code or should you use the Interface Designer?
• Part 4 is the real Cocoa 101 covering “constraints” and the type of controls we used to develop Semantic

The following screenshot is part of the 101 blog post explaining how to get used to the way to specify alignments on Mac.

Enjoy!

Pablo Santos

I'm the CTO and Founder at Códice.
I've been leading Plastic SCM since 2005. My passion is helping teams work better through version control.
I had the opportunity to see teams from many different industries at work while I helped them improving their version control practices.
I really enjoy teaching (I've been a University professor for 6+ years) and sharing my experience in talks and articles.
And I love simple code. You can reach me at @psluaces.