ThanksGiving post - Thanks for more Portable Class Library/Portable Library Project solutions for MonoTouch/MonoDroid

On this day of ThanksGiving in the US....

Thanks!

I'm really grateful for some of the input I've gotten recently from Microsoft and Xamarin.

Especially:

1. Daniel Plaisted at Microsoft has just heroically supplied a detailed idiot-proof solution to the strong naming issues for ICommand, ObservableCollection, etc.

This solution is:

I think this is what you need to do to get around the type sharing / strong name signing issues for portable libraries on Mono:

-> Extract the public key of System.Windows.dll, and put it in the project directory for the Droid System.Windows project:

 Sn –e "C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETPortable\v4.0\Profile\Profile104\System.Windows.dll" system_windows.snk  

-> Modify the Droid system.windows project to delay-sign using the extracted key. Put the following in a PropertyGroup in the csproj file:

<SignAssembly>true</SignAssembly>  <AssemblyOriginatorKeyFile>system_windows.snk</AssemblyOriginatorKeyFile>  <DelaySign>true</DelaySign>  

-> Change the assembly version of the Droid System.Windows project (in AssemblyInfo.cs) to:

2.0.5.0   

In my testing, I didn't seem to need to disable strong name verification. So I don't think it will present any extra barriers for newbies – once you have these changes made they'll just need to get your code and it will build correctly.

However, if you do run into problems, try running the following from an admin VS command prompt:

 sn -Vr *,7cec85d7bea7798e   

Let me know how this works!

I've tested it - it seems to work really, really well :) This solution is now pushed into vNext at https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross/commit/f6a88048467838e5ac5ca687744dc0b2d1958aa8

It seems to solve:
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13028321/portable-class-library-strong-assembly-reference-problems-in-monotouch-monodroid
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13197546/mvvmcross-vnext-observablecolletion-is-defined-in-an-assembly-that-is-not-refer

2. The Xamarin team for solving all the issues caused by sln file changes in VS11/VS2012 - https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4919

These changes may sound trivial, but they've been making code sharing very hard since May this year - and it's great that I can now dropbox/skydrive share my projects and solutions again now between Mac and PC :)

3. Michael, Alan, Jeff (and others) within Xamarin for fixing the problems with building the new Profiles - including 104 - https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7173

I hope by naming a few people I haven't upset anyone else who's helped.

I really am grateful to everyone who's helping  :)

Now... I'm going back to write some more PCL code... :)