Question

I need to load and process many things before my app starts, so when I test it on my iPhone it’s always killed by iOS because it hangs the iPhone for too much time.

I then decided to write a loading screen class for my Apps, something that shows immediatly a logo and a progress indicator (keeping it responsive to avoid being killed by iOS), while in a background a separate thread initializes all my ViewControllers and then closes the loading screen and shows the main window.

What is the best way to do it with MonoTouch?

Any suggestion is welcome.
Thank you.

Answer 1

This is how I do it:

In the FinishedLaunching method, initialize and add your splash view to the main window:

window.AddSubview(this.splashView);

After that, invoke your code that does all the stuff you want to do in a thread/async invocation. I usually use the ThreadPool. Remember to invoke on the main thread:

ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(delegate {
    this.BeginInvokeOnMainThread(delegate {
        //Initialize stuff here
        //...
        //when done, add your initial view to the window and remove the splash view
        //eg.:
        //window.AddSubview(myController.View);
        //this.splashView.RemoveFromSuperview();
    });
});

// show the window, which only displays the splash view now and return
window.MakeKeyAndVisible();
return true;

A rough example, but I hope it helps.