Building a Login Screen With Xamarin’s MonoTouch and XCode StoryBoard

Introduction

I’ve been hard at work learning the MonoTouch framework from Xamarin recently.  For those that don’t know, MonoTouch is a framework that runs on top of the Apple XCode development environment that allows you to essentially use the .net framework as your programming language of choice instead of objective C (I hope I got that right).  Since it has been a while since I’ve used C, and I have so much stuff I’ve done in C# I can leverage, this seems like a good fit.

I’m about a good solid week of programming into this and I have to admit I’ve gotten pretty frustrated all around.  My frustration is not with MonoTouch or XCode specifically, but I have had some unpleasant thoughts about both as I go through this struggle.  Simple things like creating a button and having an action from it can seem almost impossible for the most trivial of reasons (as it turns out).

The Mono Project

So, here is the project that you can run yourself.  I find often, bloggers don’t include working code which can be very frustrating.  I try and avoid that if I can.  This project is actually the one I built from scratch while doing the 13 minute demo. 

Basically, we are building an application whose final screen looks like this:

The Video