Skip to main content

Xamarin Objective Sharpie: a binding definition generator for third party Objective C libraries

Xamarin iOS allows you to consume a third-party Objective-C library. Before you had to use Xamarin.iOS's Binding Projects to create a C# binding to the native Objective-C libraries. Inside this Binding project you’ll find two files: ApiDefinition.cs and StructsAndEnums.cs.

The ApiDefinition.cs is where you will define the API contract, this is the file that describes how the underlying Objective-C API is projected into C#. The StructsAndEnums.cs file is the file where you will enter any definitions that are required by the interfaces and delegates.

To bind your library you will have to create C# interfaces and annotate these interfaces with attributes to map the C# interface to the corresponding Objective-C class. Although it’s not too hard to do this, expect a lot of work for a moderate size  Objective-C library.

To make this job easier, Xamarin introduced a new tool: Objective Sharpie, a very powerful binding definition generator for third party Objective C libraries to help provide APIs matching the .NET idioms.

“Objective Sharpie takes much of the manual work of translating Objective C APIs into binding definitions that are consumed by Xamarin’s binding tools. Download your third party library, point Objective Sharpie to its header files, and off you go.”

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

.NET 8–Keyed/Named Services

A feature that a lot of IoC container libraries support but that was missing in the default DI container provided by Microsoft is the support for Keyed or Named Services. This feature allows you to register the same type multiple times using different names, allowing you to resolve a specific instance based on the circumstances. Although there is some controversy if supporting this feature is a good idea or not, it certainly can be handy. To support this feature a new interface IKeyedServiceProvider got introduced in .NET 8 providing 2 new methods on our ServiceProvider instance: object? GetKeyedService(Type serviceType, object? serviceKey); object GetRequiredKeyedService(Type serviceType, object? serviceKey); To use it, we need to register our service using one of the new extension methods: Resolving the service can be done either through the FromKeyedServices attribute: or by injecting the IKeyedServiceProvider interface and calling the GetRequiredKeyedServic...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t...
Read more