Objective Sharpie Tools & Commands

Overview of the tools included with Objective Sharpie, and the command line arguments to use them.

Once Objective Sharpie is successfully installed, open a terminal and familiarize yourself with the commands Objective Sharpie has to offer:

$ sharpie -help
usage: sharpie [OPTIONS] TOOL [TOOL_OPTIONS]

Options:
  -h, -help                Show detailed help
  -v, -version             Show version information

Telemetry Options:
  -tlm-about               Show a detailed overview of what usage and binding
                             information will be submitted to Xamarin by
                             default when using Objective Sharpie.
  -tlm-do-not-submit       Do not submit any usage or binding information to
                             Xamarin. Run 'sharpie -tml-about' for more
                             information.
  -tlm-do-not-identify     Do not submit Xamarin account information when
                             submitting usage or binding information to Xamarin
                             for analysis. Binding attempts and usage data will
                             be submitted anonymously if this option is
                             specified.

Available Tools:
  xcode              Get information about Xcode installations and available SDKs.
  pod                Create a Xamarin C# binding to Objective-C CocoaPods
  bind               Create a Xamarin C# binding to Objective-C APIs
  update             Update to the latest release of Objective Sharpie
  verify-docs        Show cross reference documentation for [Verify] attributes
  docs               Open the Objective Sharpie online documentation

Objective Sharpie provides the following tools:

Tool	Description
xcode	Provides information about the current Xcode installation and the versions of iOS and Mac SDKs that are available. We will be using this information later when we generate our bindings.
pod	Searches for, configures, installs (in a local directory), and binds Objective-C CocoaPod libraries available from the master Spec repository. This tool evaluates the installed CocoaPod to automatically deduce the correct input to pass to the bind tool below. New in 3.0!
bind	Parses the header files (*.h) in the Objective-C library into the initial ApiDefinition.cs and StructsAndEnums.cs files.
update	Checks for newer versions of Objective Sharpie and downloads and launches the installer if one is available.
verify-docs	Shows detailed information about [Verify] attributes.
docs	Navigates to this document in your default web browser.

To get help on a specific Objective Sharpie tool, enter the name of the tool and the -help option. For example, sharpie xcode -help returns the following output:

$ sharpie xcode -help
usage: sharpie xcode [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -h, -help        Show detailed help
  -v, -verbose     Be verbose with output

Xcode Options:
  -sdks            List all available Xcode SDKs. Pass -verbose for more details.

Before we can start the binding process, we need to get information about our current installed SDKs by entering the following command into the Terminal sharpie xcode -sdks. Your output may differ depending on which version(s) of Xcode you have installed. Objective Sharpie looks for SDKs installed in any Xcode*.app under the /Applications directory:

$ sharpie xcode -sdks
sdk: appletvos9.0    arch: arm64
sdk: iphoneos9.1     arch: arm64   armv7
sdk: iphoneos9.0     arch: arm64   armv7
sdk: iphoneos8.4     arch: arm64   armv7
sdk: macosx10.11     arch: x86_64  i386
sdk: macosx10.10     arch: x86_64  i386
sdk: watchos2.0      arch: armv7

From the above, we can see that we have the iphoneos9.1 SDK installed on our machine and it has arm64 architecture support. We will be using this value for all the samples in this section. With this information in place, we are ready to parse an Objective-C library header files into the initial ApiDefinition.cs and StructsAndEnums.cs for the Binding project.