How to Add iOS Devices to Your Developer Profile

This is the second of our four step process towards deploying an iOS application to a device. In our first segment we walked through the full process of creating iOS developer certificates in Visual Studio. Our next step is registering any iOS devices we need onto our iOS developer profile. This registration plus our third step - creating an App ID - are prerequisites to the final step of building provisioning profiles. Once we have provisioning profiles we can actually test our our apps on real devices.

Grab your iOS devices and let's get started.

Step 1: Get Your Device's UDID

To register your iOS device with Apple you'll need to know its UDID (Unique Device Identifier). Unfortunately there is currently no way to get your device's UDID in Visual Studio, but you can easily get the UDID in iTunes.

Connect your iOS device to your machine, open iTunes, and click on your device.

From there, click on the "Serial Number" text to reveal the device's UDID.

Unfortunately you can not copy this number to the clipboard, therefore you'll have to reference it when registering your device on Apple's developer portal, which we'll cover next.

Step 2: Register the Device on Apple's Developer Portal

Now that we have the device's identifier, we have to register it with Apple. On Apple's iOS developer site, click on the "Certificates, Identifiers, & Profiles" link.

Next, click on "Devices" under iOS Apps.

At the top of the list of iOS devices, click the plus icon to add a new device.

At the following screen, give the device a name and provide the UDID we found in iTunes earlier.

Finally, click the register button to finish the device registration process.

That's it! We now have our devices setup and associated with our iOS developer account. We'll need these devices available when we setup provisioning profiles for testing our applications. We'll tackle that in the last of our four step series. In our next step, we'll look at the final requirement before creating provisioning profiles - registering an App Id.