CocoaSharp Spark is still alive

Well, it looks like I’m gonna get read/write access to the CocoaSharp codebase. Miguel de Icazza and Geoff Norton have decided that it would be kosher to do so. I’m actually pretty excited because I’ve made a truck load of user-level additions to the my local copy of the software that any commercial app developer will need. The changes I’ve made are especially important to those developers that need to create custom views….like me.I’m still a little leary of the project but my frustrations have started to fade with the notion of actually having write access. I’ve looked at the python binding for cocoa as well as the ruby binding…and fuck that. Although Microsoft makes a serious shity software…in my book…they are still the numero uno, industry leader for development languages and tools.Now my only worry is whether CocoaSharp will support 64-bit apps? If it can’t and the only way for me to create a true 64-bit app on Leopard is to use Objective-C….we’ll…I’ll seriously have to reconsider CocoaSharp…yikes. Once you go C#…you really can’t go back….beeyatch.

Dwindling Interest in CocoaSharp

For the past 3 weeks, I’ve been using CocoaSharp to develop some tutorials on how to show other C# WinForm engineers how to create graphical applications on the Mac. As I develop said tutorials, it is with ultimate certainty that I will find a function missing from the current CocoaSharp implementation. Well, this shit is open source so I add the damn function and keep moving. After a while, I’ve made about 15 modifications that would be absolutely for others to effectively use this software library in a commercial setting.So, I email the CocoaSharp mailing list and ask for the procedure for submitting enhancments. Holy shit did that start a narled flurry of responses. Apparently, this is a touchy subject. It seems that there really isn’t any official procedure that can quickly get the changes in. It was told that a ‘month or two’ is about average.At the moment, I’ve followed all the suggested directions…..and now I wait. If these ‘extremely’ trivial and obvious enhancements don’t get excepted in less than 5 days….you can forget it. That is a GIANT red flag…that this project is slowly dying.And so, I wait…..In the meantime, I’ve also been learning a ton about Objective-C and Cocoa. I’ve also been really trying to ‘accept’ Xcode as the my IDE (Integrated Developement Environment) as well. Current impressions:

Item	Grade
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET	A
Microsoft C# Programming Language	A
Objective-C 1.X Programming Language	C-
Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language	?
C++ Programming Language	B

From what I’ve read, Apple will be making some crazy awesome changes to Objective-C to finally start modernizing the 1983 language. Unfortunately, there currently advertized enhancements will only get them to the late 90’s. The addition of garbage collection is by far the most important update. Properties are nice and will only add to the productive when compared to the effort of writing software in the 1.x version. However, it still lacks the simplest of constructs (i.e namespace) and a cannot-live-without construct (i.e. generics). However, it this is truely the only language that Apple is supporting on their platform….what are ya gonna do. I’m slowly warming up to it….

OutlineView Example

So, I’ve started an good tutorial and example project for how to use CocoaSharp and Cocoa’s NSOutlineView (i.e. TreeVew). This shit took me a lot longer than I thought, however, I’ve learned alot about some of the nuances of Cocoa and InterfaceBuilder. At this stage of the CocoaSharp’s developement and my learning curve for Cocoa..the same little tutorial performed in C# + WinForms + VisualStudio.Net would have taken be about 20mins…rather than the 5hrs. To be fair, I am battling a learning curve for Cocoa…and that curve is really higher than it should be.I’ll be posting the finished product up on the Google Groups page I started. The current CocoaSharp Twiki royally sucks…so…I’m gonna blaze a new trail…at least for tutorials….

First Impressions of CocoaSharp

I’d like to start out by saying thank you for great job so far on the CocoaSharp progress. My recent dabblings with the software library have got my juices flowing. Unfortunately, I’m joined there mailing list in both frustration and proactiveness.BackgroundI’m a veteran C++/MFC and C#/WinForms software developer….but I run Mac at home (for about the last 5 years). Over the Xmas holidays, I ..finally…purchased a new iMac and I love it. The nerd engineer in me also installed the Developer Tools to just fart around. I took a look at some of the examples for Cocoa using Xcode. After about 3 days the following were my observations:

1. With the exception of Apple, no one uses Objective C/C++ anymore for a good reason…it sucks.
2. My appreciation for Visual Studio .NET is at an all time high. I now realize how much that tool make me productive and…how confortable I am developing with it.

….If only I could write in C# on the mac….enter Mono…So I installed Mono and I was quick coding along…..I was using Xcode for my editor and the terminal and make scripts to build…(ugh, what a cludge). After my 3 command line application developed in Mono….I now wanted to move on to some GUI developement…I chose to work with this CocoaSharp stuff becuase it seems to have the best architecture strategy for developing native OS X GUIs via C#.CocoaSharp TutorialI finally stumbled upon the correct website (because there are like 9 million redirects or broken links) and found a couple of tutorials on the Wiki. I had great success with the helloworld tutorial…so my confidence was growing in Cocoa#. Unfortunately, they were quick dashed when I started working on the second tutorial.I first I was getting some silly run-time error about a null reference exception (great). So, I email the author of the tutorials, Tim Davis, and he quickly determined that the tutorials were out of date and emailed me a zip of the latest-and-greatest. As luck would -not- have it, those broke to….Ugh, okay…so I then I pulled down the latest-n-greatest code from subversion (first I ever have used these tools)…and things started to finally work.What the hell?So, I finally realize why I was having so much trouble with tutorials and examples that came next-to-zero documentation. Everything was written with the assumption that the reader had some knowledge of the Mac developement enviorment (InterfaceBuilder) and all the other crap. Well, I know I don’t. In my opinion, the majority of people visiting CocoaSharp will be Windows C# .NET developers. In the software engineer profession they probably out OS X Cocoa Developers at least 20 to 1.So…I’m taking the pludge…I’m volunteering my time to create documentation with my bretheren in mind and use are really example as the tutorial. Let’s see these CocoaSharp folk bite.