EDIT: I'm afraid I initially did this one all wrong. Before, I edited the xib directly, which is apparently a risky proposition. So let's try again, the safe way. If you read this before, you'll notice one or two changes. ;^)
I believe we'll start with MonoMac. MonoMac itself is a strange beast. Even Xamarin employees on their official forums have a hard time explaining the difference.
Here's the bottom line: MonoMac lets you make apps of nearly limitless size that you can't sign easily or release on the app store. Apps made by MonoMac are also intended to be run by someone who has installed the Mono runtime separately. Xamarin.Mac will crunch out what parts of Mono your app uses, and package that up with your app's code before creating an executable for the App Store (or however else you'd like to distriute it). You have options for doing something similar yourself, like using BockBuild, the package Banshee uses to be a self-sufficient app bundle, but it's going to be more work.
Xamarin.mac also doesn't [yet] let you pay for a Xamarin license on the month-by-month plan. Which stinks. Makes some sense, since I don't believe MonoMac has the size limitation that Xamarin.iOS or .Android have, and you could concievably build your entire app in MonoMac, pay $25, compile and sign, and slap something on the Mac App Store. /wink wink
Resizing your window
But let's get to the code. It's going to be horribly quick today. You've got Xamarin Studio installed. Open it. Select "New Solution" on the left. Under "Unsupported", select "MonoMac Project". Enter an incredibly awesome name, like MyMonoMacUI. Hit okay.
Pow. Just for fun, go ahead and hit Command-Return. Lookit there! A window! That's cookin' with gas. Go ahead and hit Command-Shift-Return or click the stop button at the upper left of Xamarin Studio.
So let's change that window's size. Usually, what we'd do would be to double-click MainWindow.xib, open XCode, and set up our UI there, just like Xamarin's Hello, Mac tell us to. But in my limited exposure to Xamarin, that's not the best route for quick, pixel-perfect designs.
I am going to build our first app with what's called "xibless" code. We still have a xib -- MainWindow.xib -- but we're going to use the Initialize and AwakeFromNib methods in MainWindow.cs to set up our UI in code instead. This lets us, I think, much more efficiently position our widgets pixel-perfectly. It also means we have less to learn; if you can C# your way around the UI, you'll never have to open XCode at all.
So resizing is actually pretty easy. Open up MainWindow.cs in Xamarin Studio, and look for the Initialize method. Insert this line to change the frame's size and position:
this.SetFrame(new RectangleF (10, 11, 800, 800), true);
If you just pasted that in, you'll note that RectangleF is red. I'm going to assume you know how to use using in C# and simply say we're missing the reference to RectangleF's namespace. Easy enough to add. Right click RectangleF in Xamarin Studio, select Resolve to let Xamarin Studio give us a list of possible references, and then select using System.Drawing from our options.
Go ahead and hit command+return and watch the form open up. Wow.
And there you go. A square window. We're using a RectangleF to position the window on the screen. There are two types of rectangles I've run into so far -- the RectangleF and Rectangle. The only difference is that RectangleF expects float values and the Rectangle wants ints. The first value, a 10, is how far we'll position the window on the screen from the left. The second number, the 11, is how far from the top we'll be. Then we have the window's width and height, both 800 for now.
Man, we're rolling now.
One freebee "power user" tip, not that I claim to be one: To open more than one instance of Xamarin Studio, use this line in your Terminal (assuming you've got Xamarin Studio in the default location):
open -n /Applications/Xamarin\ Studio.app/
I know, not a lot yet, but we're starting. Happy hacking!
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