Automatic configuration with accounts and capabilities

Apple provides a wide variety of useful services that can be included in any application. Enabling your application to support these services has always been a hassle due to the number of tasks a developer is required to manually set up. These include adding entitlements, such as the App ID, linking frameworks to the project, and adding required fields to the projects .plist file. Additionally, each of these services has its own requirements, which means that supporting multiple services would require different steps to complete.

With the introduction of Xcode 5, Apple has made these struggles a thing of the past using automatic configuration. With automatic configuration, all a developer needs is an Apple ID linked to a developer account.

Navigate to Xcode | Preferences and select the Accounts section (new in Xcode 5). From here, you can add all your Developer Program Apple IDs and view details related to each account. Clicking on the + button located on the left-hand side panel will give you the option to add a new Apple ID. Doing so will provide a direct connection between Xcode 5 and the Apple Developer Portal. Once logged in, click on the View Details... button at the bottom-right corner of the screen. A new window will appear with details of all code-signing identities and provisioning profiles attached to the selected account.

Under the General tab in the project editor, you will see a new option, Team, found in the Identity section. Selecting this option will show you a list of identities related to the account we previously added. By selecting your respective signing identity, Xcode 5 will be able to verify whether you have all proper provision profiles and even offer to create them for you if required.

Potentially, the biggest advancement provided by automatic configuration is the Capabilities tab (new in Xcode 5) found in the project editor. This streamlined approach will allow you to configure specific platform features, such as iCloud, In-App Purchases, and Game Center, without having to visit the developer portal as shown in the following screenshot. Xcode 5 will automatically configure the provisioning profile, add App ID entitlements, and link all required frameworks for you, automatically:

If you prefer to set up your features and capabilities the old way, you may still do so in the Apple Developer Portal.