Question

I’m doing my first iOS App with Monotouch and I’m loading quite a lot of images from my resources directory. Every now and then I get a typo in a filename and the app will then crash on me spewing out some unintelligible error message. (I’ll try adding deciphering stack traces to my skill set any day now …)

I was thinking that there must be a smarter way to handle this. For example one could have a utility script that goes through the resources directory and constructs a list of global constants based on its contents. Each file in the resources gets an entry.

So that MyResources/Icons/HomeIcon.png will be represented by the constant MyResources.Icons.HomeIcon_png. Then one could have something like Inotify (don’t know what that would be on Mac) watch the resources directory and regenerate the constants file on every change.

This would of course also give nice autocompletion for resources.

Maybe there’s already something like this is already in Monodevelop or online somewhere? Otherwise how would I go about setting it up?

Or maybe there’s some other smart way of mitigating the problem?

Answer 1

So I spent four precious hours to cook up this little python script that sort of solves my problem. For now it’s the best solution to my problem.

http://github.com/oivvio/Monodevelop-Resources-as-Constants