This week ILM, a local Minneapolis Microsoft consulting company, hosted it’s 5th annual Microsoft Developers Conference (MDC). Justin Grammens from Recursive helped ILM setup the mobile track and even though it was mostly a Microsoft-focused event, we brought our Macs, iPhones, and Droids and talked mobile.

There were three mobile presentations that served as an overview to their respective platforms. Adam Grocholski from RBA consulting presented Windows Phone 7, Donn Felker presented Android, and I presented iOS. During the last breakout session Justin Grammens moderated a tablet discussion with the three of us as panelists.

I have to admit, presenting an Introduction to iOS talk isn’t as easy as it sounds. For the majority of .NET developers, everything about iOS is new. The Macintosh OS, Xcode, Interface Builder, Objective-C, UNIX, and so on. My challenge was trying to cover the landscape, but yet still develop a simple iOS app to show some of the details involved in the development process (i.e., IBOutlet, File Owner, etc..)

To focus just on iOS, I purposely avoided using the F word (“Flash”, of course), politics involved around app store approval, provisioning, and ad-hoc distribution. I gave a quick overview of the tools and library stack (from core os to UIKit) and started a sample app.

The sample app was a simple UITabViewController with 4 tabs that showed simple views. The views were a UITableView, UIWebView, MKMapView, and a UIButton that played a movie. I wanted to introduce a table because it’s so common and allowed me to touch on delegates. Web view allowed me to preach on mobile web goodness. Map Kit is a cool native control with high presentation value (i.e., no code to type!) and the movie was to show how easy it is to integrate multimedia on iOS.

I would estimate we had 120 people in the audience and I enjoyed giving the talk. My slides and sample code is attached.

If you were at the presentation, I certainly hope you enjoyed it! Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Introduction to iOS Development – Slides

Introduction to iOS Development – Sample Code

PS. The tablet talk was Awesome. We talked development, fragmentation, mobile web, carriers, manufacturers, the whole shebang related to tablets. That deserves a post of it’s own…