On my way home last night I was thinking about Apple’s new Passbook feature that’s coming with iOS 6 later this year. I wanted to know a little more about it so, as I sat on the boat, I opened the PDF and started reading. It’s a short document so I skimmed over it pretty quickly and thought – I wonder is there a C# library for generating them.
Without even checking whether or not there was one, I decided to try and build one myself. I’ve always wanted to make something that others might find useful. Partially for the challenge and partially for the feedback. I fired up Visual Studio 2012 and got cracking. Within about 4 hours I had a basic, working version of the library. It doesn’t work perfectly, but iOS will recognize it and open it. It won’t save it into Passbook because of a signing issue, but progress was made!
I got a few pointers from the Apple Developer Boards, which helped me debug the packages I was generating.
If you’re interested, please check it out on GitHub https://github.com/tomasmcguinness/dotnet-passbook.
It’s written for .Net 4.5 RC and uses Bouncy Castle for PKCS#7 signing.
Tomas McGuinness 