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Showing posts from July, 2014

iOS Persisting Data

After completing the first PluralSight course and a working App, the first thing I noticed is that my app does not persist data. One of the main goals of this app is to help you track, over time, how many carbs you eat. You can enter data into the app, interact with that data, but once you close the app it all goes away. Thats not terrible useful, so I needed to find a way to store the data that is entered. I know a little about iOS, and knew that CoreData was a framework that iOS has to store data within an app, so I searched on PluralSight for CoreData and found one course, Introduction to iOS for .NET Developers , by Jon Flanders. I thought, "Hey! That is me, awesome." First major difference in this course over others I have watched, he has broken it up into almost all 1 minute segments. That sort of makes sense here because he is mostly just relating .NET to iOS development, and assumes that once you know how to translate what you want to do in .NET to iOS that you can

Building my first iOS App

I have been following along with a PluralSight video by John Sonmez , to learn the basics of developing for iOS. After creating a simple "Hello World" app, he moves into creating a protein tracking app. I have recently been looking into a diet change that would see me limit the amount of carbs that I eat significantly, so I plan on taking the protein tracking idea and apply it to carb tracking. Hopefully I can create an app that will be simple to use and will help me follow my new diet. After I complete the course, and with it a starter app, I will try to add to this app and give it new features while also expanding my knowledge of iOS development. So the first steps are to put some controls on the screen. This reminds me a lot of how Visual Studio works when in Design mode. You have a "toolbox" full of controls and you can drag and drop them onto the view. You align those controls with guidelines provided by the IDE. You can anchor a control to a part of the vie

iOS First Lessons

One of the items I was most interested in finding out about iOS Development was using Unit Tests. To my great delight, the first "Hello World" app walkthrough that I watched, pointed out that Tests come in the default project when you create a new App Project. So I immediately wanted to try out the Tests and see what they are all about. As someone that has been learning about TDD practices, it came as a bit of a nice surprise that the default Tests, actually fail when I tried to run them without any code. Based on the TDD mantra of Red, Green, Refactor; you would want your Tests to fail first to ensure that your changes would then fix the broken code into a working system. Looking into the Test Class, I see some code that looks fairly familiar to what I am used to when I create Unit Tests in .NET. There are setUp and tearDown functions that would be used before and after each test. And a single Test function that appears to be throwing an exception because it has not been

Learning iOS

I am a .NET Developer by experience and knowledge, but am a huge Apple user at home. Just about every piece of technology that I own is made by Apple, and I own just about 1 of every major product Apple sells. Given my affinity towards using Apple products, I thought it would be fun to expand my development knowledge by trying out iOS development and try to create an iPhone app that I could use for myself. My goal is to share what I learn, what hurdles I overcome, and how I feel about development differences between .NET and iOS. Some of my initial thoughts and questions. How will working in Xcode differ from Visual Studio. Visual Studio stands pretty far ahead of any other IDE I have ever used in terms of both built in functionality and amount of extensibility. One of my Must-Have additions for Visual Studio is NCrunch , and tool that continuously builds the Solution and runs Automated tests against the latest code. NCrunch is fantastic in that I can code away, and build my tests wi