Testing iOS Apps on Hardware Devices

Deploying Apps directly to devices

One of the trickier parts of doing iOS development is registering your device (iPad, iPhone, or iPod) with Apple so that you can test an app on that device. This process is called creating a provisioning profile. You can follow either the  Apple guide or the Xamarin guide for doing this, but I’m writing my own guide because things didn’t go very smoothly for me while following either of theirs. (Although the Xamarin guide was easier to understand.)

I’m doing iOS development using Xamarin Studio, but the process for creating a provisioning profile is essentially the same if you are doing development with Xcode.

Developing iOS Apps in Visual Studio with MacinCloud

Cross-Platform Mobile Development with Xamarin

Suppose you’re a .Net  developer and you recently discovered Xamarin’s cross-platform framework for doing mobile app development using the .Net languages and libraries. You’ve used Visual Studio to make a killer Android app.
Now you want to make an iOS version of the app, but you don’t have a Mac– and Apple’s licensing requirements specify that you must use a Mac to build iOS apps. Apple is fine with you doing all the development (writing the code and creating the UIs) anywhere you like, but the code has to be compiled and linked on a Mac.

Learn to Write iOS Apps!

Next term, Spring 2018, at Lane Community College, I will be teaching a course in iPad and iPhone app development, CS235IM. This is a beginning course  in writing apps for iPhones and iPads. We will be using the Xamarin platform to write native apps using C#.  This course is offered for college credit (4 credits) and will be offered both on-campus and online. Online students can participate from anywhere in the world and at any time of the day (or night)!

Why my next PC will be a Mac!

The first computer I programmed was a DEC PDP 11. That was way back in 1977 when I was a senior in high school. Since then, I’ve used a lot of different computers and operating systems: UNIX (and a variety of its offshoots), VMS, CPM, DOS and Windows. Did you notice there was one I didn’t mention?

The first Mac I saw was the original one. I was an Electrical Engineering student at the time and it didn’t seem to be good for much besides writing term papers with nice fonts. It just couldn’t do the stuff I needed to do- like run MathCad or the Borland Turbo Pascal IDE. As time went on I developed an aversion to the seemingly snobby cultishness of Apple and its devotees. It seemed to me that if you used a Mac, you would have to buy a black turtle-neck, promise to never use any of the evil software from Redmond, and bow and pray toward Cupertino 5 times a day.

But,