Custom Animations for the UINavigationController in MonoTouch

Pushing and popping controllers in a standard UINavigationController is a frequent activity when navigating an iOS app. The transition from controller to controller on the navigation stack may be optionally animated. Unfortunately, there's little choice regarding the animation itself. The developer determines whether or not the default right-to-left (push) or left-to-right (pop) effect is rendered by setting a boolean.

In some areas of my UI I wanted more control over the animations in my navigation stack. This thread on Stack Overflow was a great place to start. I ported some of the Objective-C code I found to C# extension methods as follows:

//Allows a UINavigationController to push using a custom animation transition
public static void PushControllerWithTransition(this UINavigationController 
  target, UIViewController controllerToPush, 
  UIViewAnimationOptions transition)
{
  UIView.Transition(target.View, 0.75d, transition, delegate() {
    target.PushViewController(controllerToPush, false);
  }, null);
}
		
//Allows a UINavigationController to pop a using a custom animation 
public static void PopControllerWithTransition(this UINavigationController 
  target, UIViewAnimationOptions transition)
{
  UIView.Transition(target.View, 0.75d, transition, delegate() {
    target.PopViewControllerAnimated(false);
  }, null);			
}

With these extensions in scope, moving between controllers with a flip animation is now as trivial as this:

//Pushing someController to the top of the stack
NavigationController.PushControllerWithTransition(someController, 
  UIViewAnimationOptions.TransitionFlipFromLeft);

//Popping the current controller off the top of the stack
NavigationController.PopControllerWithTransition(
  UIViewAnimationOptions.TransitionFlipFromRight);