IDE Woes

The first thing I've noticed with the transition to working with Cocoa and Objective C has been the massive difference in the working environments. Visual Studio felt like home. Where Xcode feels like a foreign country to me. It is very much the same lost feeling I had when I fist made the transition from Windows XP to the OS X world. Nothing was familiar. I didn't know my way around. If it hadn't been for prior *nix experience I'd have been totally lost and a complete 'Stranger in a strange land' if you will.

Okay, so I've got this project started, no issues there. Pretty small potatos to get that going, great. Now what? I mean, I'm looking at this crazy IDE that is totally new to me. No solution explorer, no property panes, no intermediate or watch windows as I am used to them. What's a Microsoft developer to do at this point?

Yeah, I googled it - "learning objective-c"

This lead me to a few things.

• Thing 1 - Apple's Developers reference For all of us Microsoft guys, this is Apple's answer to the MSDN Help Library

• Thing 2 - Learn Objective–C on the Mac by Mark Dalrymple & Scott Knaster This has been a great book so far. It feels a bit rudamentary for anyone who's been doing development for a while, but when switching platforms, languages and enviornments, it is moving exactly the speed that I need. I think I would be overwhelmed otherwise.

So where does that leave me now? It leaves me with a lot of reading while I figure out the interface and how the tools work. I'll hopefully have a few small trial apps written tonight and tomorrow as i get more familiar with the toolset and will post a little more about the trials and tribulations. ;)

Stay Tuned.