MonoTouch for deployment on iPhone

Question

I developed a number of applications using MonoTouch and used an emulator for the iPhone, now I need to deploy the application for my iPhone for further testing.

I bought an iPhone SDK from Apple, but I cannot find how to deploy and activate the MonoTouch app on my iPhone.

Any pointers please?

Answer 1

As already mentioned, you clearly need the paid version of MonoTouch and the iPhone SDK. After you are sorted, you need to create a developer certificate on the iPhone developers portal, upload it to your dev machine and add it to your keychain.

Once you have done this, you must create a provisioning profile for your physical device, which you again run through the developer portal. Once you have a provisioning profile, download it to your computer and add it to your iPhone through the Organizer app in Xcode.

Then run MonoDevelop, and if everything goes according to plan, you should be able to deploy the assembly to your iPhone. You can verify that MonoDevelop correctly defined your certificates by opening the Project Settings window, and in the Assembly section and under the signature iPhone Signing you should see your developer certificate and preparation profile.

Details of the steps required for Apple iPhone Dev Site

Answer 2

Here are the MonoTouch creation docs for distribution

http://monotouch.net/Documentation/Building_for_Distribution

Answer 3

I understand that you must have a Novell Monotouch deployment license to deploy to the device.

Answer 4

According to your statement:

When I compile, I get: "There are no valid iPhone code signing keys found in the keychain.

This is actually an Xcode question, and then Monotouch,

The message indicates that your keychain does not contain the signature keys used to create certificates and training profiles.

If you follow Apple’s steps to create a certificate (request), and then follow the profiles, they will also indicate that you can export your private key (p13 file) and keep it somewhere safe. If you switch to another laptop, for example, you will need to import this key again in order to make the machine valid.

If something went wrong (that is, you accidentally deleted your private key, ..) this message will be displayed because Xcode will not be able to verify that the profiles are being used on a virtual machine.

Go to this instructions page (required Apple account credentials) to check if these steps have been followed and check the Keychain access application on your mac if you see the developer’s certificate in the "My certificates" section and if you deploy it, you can see the private key as a child node.