Wallace B. McClure

Given that I have a cast on my arm, I installed the MonoDroid Development Framework for Apple Macs today.  I walked through it and found that things are pretty much the same as with the MonoDroid plugin for Visual Studio 2010.  This post shows the video displaying this.  This video is based on MonoDroid Preview 11.1.

One of the most annoying things when I build a desktop app in .NET is MessageBox.Show() for displaying images or using a alert() in Javascript is that I have to click on the popup dialog to make it go away.  I love the little messages at the bottom of an Android screen that come up, display some text, and then go away.  Its a Toast.  Here's a simple call to make one display.

So, I found a couple of issues in developing with MonoTouch that I need to be aware of.  These are:

Sweet, I found out back in early December that an intro article that I wrote regarding MonoDroid will be a "featured article" in Visual Studio Magazine.  I have no idea what "featured article" means, but hey it sounds good. :-)

Error logging, its such a simple concept.  When an error occurs, store some kind of information about the error.  For some reason, we don't seem to do lots of it.  Why?  Well, its usually fairly easy to track down the information about an exception.  With most web apps, you can pretty much repeat the errors as you need to.  Logging on the server is fairly easy.  Networks are fairly high speed and dependable items of infrastructure.  Is error logging really that necessary?

The ability to program Android devices in C# using many of the libraries that you are already familiar with is rather cool.  You may/not have heard about MonoDroid, which is an implementation of the Mono Framework, for Android.  It has been in a closed beta.  About 2 weeks ago, it became available in an open beta.  While there are a number of things that it doesn't do at this point in time, you can tell that the Mono team is working towards getting many pieces working.  If you are interested, check out the MonoDroid web site.

I was working on some json/rest web services written in windows communication foundation (wcf).  I wanted to use the System.Json namespace to do some of this.  I made an http web request asynchronously.  In my call back method, I have following code doing a linq query over this json result.