When Miguel De Icaza first announced MonoMac back in April I was pretty excited! Its been my goal for the past two years to write a half-decent, native looking, Mac OSX application with .NET. I’ve looked at the various Cocoa binding strategies for Mono and always found them lacking. Some like CocoaSharp haven’t been updated in ages, and the WinForms stuff on Mac looked plain fugly. Like Windows 95 fugly.
I found Michael Hutchinson’s quick-start post on writing a simple .NET app using MonoMac. Because I had previous experience using Interface Builder, I was able to muddle my way through building his simple app. But at the end, I wanted something more. “Hello World” is great to show you the most basic syntax of a language, and maybe how to use the compiler, but it honestly does nothing for me.
So, I set out to write real, although somewhat contrived image viewing application. Having an extensive background writing WinForms, ASP.NET and some WPF apps, the hardest part for me was trying to figure out the Cocoa equivalent to things like PictureBox, and FolderBrowserDialog. But Google as always was my friend.
I’m not going to dive into how to write the app tonight, but I will post a screen shot, and the ImageViewer source!
Nits
Yes Cocoa is based on an MVC architecture, and yes I should have put some of the code into a business class, but I didn’t.