Question: As this configuration is not supported I was wondering what alternatives people have used.

I have a universal app which currently uses a 4 tab UITabBarController on both the iPhone and iPad.

As I'd now like to use the splitviewcontroller I am faced with a design decision.

I guess I could just go with a toolbar at the top and go from there but was hoping there were more interesting techniques.

Answer: 
If you use the standard service boilerplate, but then edit `Main()`, to either:

* check `if(Environment.UserInteractive)`, or
* check the command line arguments, for example a "`-console`" switch

and change the code to run your code *directly* instead of running the standard service startup code, it should work fine.

For a full example (including self install/uninstall), see my answer [here](https://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp/browse_thread/thread/4d45e9ea5471cba4?hl=en&pli=1).

The biggest issue is allowing for the fact that your debugging runs in a different security context (the interactive user's) rather than a service account.
We use the command-line technique described by Marc Gravell in our service applications, so be sure to try it.

Note that you will be able to easily debug your application running as a true service on Windows XP and 2003, where you can interactively log into Session 0 and attach your debugger to the running service application. ["Session 0 isolation"](http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysinternals/session0changes.mspx), introduced in Windows Vista, makes it difficult to interact with/debug service applications so we end up doing our first round of testing and debugging on XP.

Good luck.