Last week I was lucky enough to attend the MonkeySpace conference, where I got to present 3 different talks. This is one of my favorite conferences as the attendees tend to work on some very interesing projects and have an affinity for sharing information.

The first talk I gave was about collection views. This is a very interesting technology that allows you to easily create grid-like layouts of items in iOS. Additionally, they are easy enough to extend to create any sort of layout you can imagine.

Here’s one of the examples I demonstrated during my talk. It creates a layout over a baseball field where you can toggle between the home and away teams:

The code is available here:

https://github.com/mikebluestein/CVLayoutsDemo

Up next, I presented the latest version of the excellent Xamarin.Mobile API, showing the new changes to the MediaPicker among other things. What’s particularly exciting about this is the API was open-sourced just before my talk, so I was able to demonstrate from the latest source.

Finally, for my third talk, I showed how to make a small game using the new Cocos2D-XNA API, a C# port of the widely used Cocos2D iOS API. What’s interesting about Cocos2D-XNA is that it builds on MonoGame, so it allows you to reach many platforms with the same code base.

http://www.slideshare.net/mikebluestein1/cocos2-d-xna

More information, along with sample code can be found in the article I wrote on the Xamarin site:

http://docs.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/cocos2d_xna/cocos2dxna_tutorial

Beyond my talks, I really enjoyed meeting so many new people and hearing about all the exciting work everyone is doing. I’m looking forward to MonkeySpace again next year!