I am looking to store information on my VPS that will be used by my application to present data to a user. I’ve looked around thoroughly and still can’t manage to find a solid tutorial on how to do this in a real-world application.
I’m new to C# and programming in general, so naturally I looked around a lot before posting. I found that the DataContext and LINQ classes are very helpful for obtaining data. I also researched and found out that I could use attribute-based programming and create properties that are mapped to certain tables or columns in the database.
This would also be very helpful when trying to populate my UITableView with things because I would already have a class full of properties and data that is already hooked up to my database.
However, I just don’t know how to apply this. All the remote data tutorials I see for MonoTouch and iOS in general are heavily reliant on JSON, REST, and SOAP, which I am not that familiar with.
In conclusion, all I want to do is connect to my VPS, query some data, and populate a UITableView. I know how to do the last one, but the first two are still really vague to me. Any assistance would be of great help!
.NET offers a lot of ways to communicate data and MonoTouch supports most of them. It’s worth noting that WCF (Windows Communication Framework) is not fully supported (only the Silverlight subset is available in MonoTouch).
It’s hard to recommend a specific technology without more details. If you’re new to C# (and .NET) then you should look for something that offers you (lot of) samples – both for learning and that look similar to the application(s) you want to develop. You should also look (e.g. here on stackoverflow) if people are using it and supporting it (i.e. answering questions about it).
I’ve been reading (not using yet) about ServiceStack which supports a lot of options, has great performance, many samples and supports MonoTouch. Another popular one is Protobuf.net.
You might also want to ask for other people experiences on the MonoTouch mailing-list (stackoverflow is not the best place to ask for different opinions – at least without a very specific question).