Preventing Xamarin(/Mono?) from optimizing on iOS - ios

Question

When I use reflection in ViewDidLoad like this:
foreach (var m in this.GetType().GetMethods()) {
Console.WriteLine (m.Name);
}
without any other code, methods like
Add
set_View
are not there; when I add;
public void PreventOptimizing() {
var x = this.View;
this.View = x;
this.Add (null);
}
to the class and without calling that method, they are there. So I assume the AOT compilation optimizes these methods away as they are not called. I don't know which methods it adds away so I would like the compiler, for my experiment, not to optimize anything away. How can that be done? Or is there another trick preventing automated removal of method?
Edit: so full code, if this isn't clear enough;
result output will not contain 'Add' and 'set_View';
public class TestController : UIViewController
{
public override void ViewDidLoad ()
{
base.ViewDidLoad ();
foreach (var m in this.GetType().GetMethods()) {
Console.WriteLine (m.Name);
}
}
}
Output does contain Add and set_View;
public class TestController : UIViewController
{
public void PreventOptimizing() {
var x = this.View;
this.View = x;
this.Add (null);
}
public override void ViewDidLoad ()
{
base.ViewDidLoad ();
foreach (var m in this.GetType().GetMethods()) {
Console.WriteLine (m.Name);
}
}
}

Answer 1

You either set the linker option to "Link SDK assemblies only" or use the PreserveAttribute on the class.
Details are in Xamarin website:
http://developer.xamarin.com/Guides/ios/Advanced_Topics/Linker/
Linker Behavior
The linking process can be customized in different ways. The primary
mechanism for controlling the linker in Xamarin Studio is the Linker
Behavior drop-down in the iOS Build Xamarin Studio's Project Options
dialog box. In Visual Studio, this is located in project Properties,
under iOS Build.
Preserving Code
When you use the linker it can sometimes remove code
that you might have called dynamically either using
System.Reflection.MemberInfo.Invoke, or by exporting your methods to
Objective-C using the [Export] attribute and then invoking the
selector manually.
In those cases, you can instruct the linker to consider either entire
classes to be used or individual members to be preserved by applying
the [Xamarin.iOS.Foundation.Preserve] attribute either at the
class-level or the member-level. Every member that is not statically
linked by the application is subject to be removed. This attribute is
hence used to mark members that are not statically referenced, but
that are still needed by your application.
For instance, if you instantiate types dynamically, you may want to
preserve the default constructor of your types. If you use XML
serialization, you may want to preserve the properties of your types.
You can apply this attribute on every member of a type, or on the type
itself. If you want to preserve the whole type, you can use the syntax
[Preserve (AllMembers = true)] on the type.
Sometimes you want to preserve certain members, but only if the
containing type was preserved. In those cases, use [Preserve
(Conditional=true)]