Irrelevant musings about software development

Tonight, I did a presentation on "Developing a .NET application onMac OS X using MonoMac" at the Alaska .NET Users Group meeting. I hope everyone enjoyed my presentation and learned something from it! I'd appreciate any feedback anyone has to offer!

The download link is at the end of this blog post. If you download the source, you will probably want to review all the posts I've written on MonoMac as well.

Source Code

MovieTimes source code

I use and enjoy my Microsoft 4000 keyboard very much. Its the best keyboard I found since the original Microsoft Natural Keyboard. Key placement makes sense, is comfortable to type on, I love the media keys (but honestly, why no love for next and previous track?).

The one thing I don't like however, is how Mac OSX handles PC keyboards. Why does home/end move me to the beginning and end of my document? Everybody knows they are supposed to move the cursor to the beginning and end of the current line. Thankfully, we have Double Command to help fix the issues! If only it could make the page up/down keys function like on the PC...

After I finished creating a sample application to test out the capabilities of Mono on the Mac, I figured I should create the same application in Objective-C to have an accurate understanding of what the pain points are in each technology.

The first big pain point I've come across is creating the bindings to call a web service in Objective-C. Apple provides a utility called WSMakeStubs. The utility makes creating the stubs easy and painless, or so it would seem. Out of the box the code doesn't compile.

For reasons unknown to me, WSMakeStubs utility makes duplicate method names. The issues people have with WSMakeStubs are so bad, almost every article I've read, everyone advocates using NSUrlConnection and NSXMLParser and rolling your own service calls.

Its 2010 Apple, how about coming up with a viable solution to making web service calls? Even PHP has a good web services proxy generator.