August 14th, 2013

Transitioning to Xamarin from Objective-C

Pierce Boggan
Senior Program Manager

Objective-C developers coming to Xamarin can take advantage of the Xamarin.iOS platform to create reusable C# code that can be shared with Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.Mac and various Windows platforms. However, you need not throw away all the investments you have made in Objective-C. Xamarin offers a technology called bindings that let you reuse Objective-C libraries within a Xamarin.iOS application. Additionally, Objective-C developers are often surprised to learn that C# isn’t as far from Objective-C as they think it is, while at the same time discovering all the great language features C# has to offer.

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To make the transition to Xamarin.iOS and C# smoother, we’ve created a new Xamarin for Objective-C Developers section in our developer center to serve as a starting point for Objective-C developers to learn about Xamarin.

In it, you’ll find a C# Primer for Objective-C Developers that compares and contrasts several language features between Objective-C and C#. Also, we’ve created a new iOS Binding Walkthrough that shows step-by-step how to make an existing, open-source Objective-C library, InfColorPicker, available to C# via bindings.

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We also have other documents that include detailed information on Xamarin.iOS binding technology as well as a wealth of information that includes our guidance for building cross-platform applications.

We hope you find this information makes it easier to get started with Xamarin.iOS when coming from Objective-C.

Author

Pierce Boggan
Senior Program Manager

Pierce is a Senior Program Manager on the Mobile Developer Tools team at Microsoft. He is responsible for IDE tooling for mobile developers in Visual Studio (Xamarin) and Visual Studio Code (React Native and Cordova). In his free time, Pierce enjoys playing ultimate, backpacking, and spending way too much time on side projects he will never finish.

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