How to use Mapbox in your .NET iOS app

Overview

Mapbox is a well-known service for maps and location and it provides its SDKs for multiple platforms from the web to the mobile. Within the mobile, there are SDKs for Android, iOS, ReactNative and Flutter, but none for Xamarin/.NET iOS.

Recently, I successfully created and published the NuGet package for integrating Mapbox iOS SDK to your Xamarin.iOS and/or .NET iOS app.

dotnet add package MapboxMapsObjC.iOS --version 11.4.0

In this blog, I will guide you through the steps to use that mentioned NuGet package in a .NET iOS app.

TLTR; You can access the full quickstart example from this GitHub repo.

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio for Mac or Visual Studio on Windows

• .NET 8.0.100

• .NET for iOS workload

Steps

Assumption: You already have a .NET iOS app. If not, you can just create a new empty .NET iOS app to follow this guide.

1/ Config your MAPBOX_DOWNLOADS_TOKEN

Mapbox iOS SDK is distributed privately via Mapbox's CDN which we can configure SPM/CocoaPods to download or download directly the artifacts with a MAPBOX_DOWNLOADS_TOKEN. To know how to generate that token, please check out the official guide from Mapbox.

Xamarin.iOS/.NET iOS doesn't work with SMP/Cocoapods, but we can leverage Xamarin.Build.Download package to help us download the artifacts using Direct Download approach when building the app by following these steps:

• Generate/grab MAPBOX_DOWNLOADS_TOKEN from your Mapbox account page

  

• Amend your .csproj file with the following lines

<PropertyGroup>
    <MAPBOX_DOWNLOADS_TOKEN>YOUR_MAPBOX_DOWNLOADS_TOKEN</MAPBOX_DOWNLOADS_TOKEN>
</PropertyGroup>

NOTE:MAPBOX_DOWNLOADS_TOKENis a sensitive data item, it shouldn't be committed to our git repository. We should put it in an ignored file, but still understandable by the compiler.

2/ AddMapbox iOS SDK for .NET to your project

• Open NuGet Package Manager

  

• Search for the package MapboxMapsObjC.iOS

  

• Add it to your project

  

• Try to build the project

  A successful build means you did it well by far

3/ Configure mapbox_access_token

To work with Mapbox APIs, we have to generate a personalized access token from our Mapbox account page and then put it into our project to use

• Generate/grab the access token

  

  You can use the default public token for this tutorial. If you want more control over what scopes to be used, please create a new token

• Put the generated access token into Info.plist

    <key>MBXAccessToken</key>
    <string>YOUR_MAPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN</string>
  

  NOTE:mapbox_access_token is a sensitive data item, it shouldn't be committed to our git repository. We should put it in an ignored file, but still understandable by the compiler.

4/ Add MapView control to your app

• Create MapboxViewController

public class MapboxViewController : UIViewController
{
}

• Add MapView instance with default options in ViewDidLoad

public override void ViewDidLoad()
{
    base.ViewDidLoad();

    // Use all default options
    var options = MapInitOptionsFactory.CreateWithResourceOptions(
        null, null, null, null, null
        );

    var mapView = MapViewFactory.CreateWithFrame(View.Bounds, options);
    mapView.AutoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizing.FlexibleWidth | UIViewAutoresizing.FlexibleHeight;

    View.AddSubview(mapView);
}

• Change RootViewController in AppDelegate.cs file

public override bool FinishedLaunching (UIApplication application, NSDictionary launchOptions)
{
    // create a new window instance based on the screen size
    Window = new UIWindow (UIScreen.MainScreen.Bounds);

    Window.RootViewController = new MapboxViewController();

    // make the window visible
    Window.MakeKeyAndVisible ();

    return true;
}

• Check the result

  

Wrap up

I just guided you on how to use Mapbox in a .NET iOS project. You can do the same steps for a Xamarin.iOS project.

I want to port all native examples to .NET iOS, but it'll be a time-consuming task. Single me will last for a very long time. I hope the community can contribute to this GitHub repo and/or to their repos.