Welcome to another installment in my series exploring the specific problems that nearly beat me this week. I write these on Sunday night after a huge week of balancing my work and fatherly responsibilities so I hope they make sense…
Author: Simon Lamb
Xamarin and Android – Specific Solutions to Specific Problems #2
Welcome to the second post in my Specific Solutions to Specific Problems series. Hopefully somebody is getting some benefit out of these but even if nobody is reading it, the process is pretty cathartic anyway…
These are a handful of issues that I encountered in my second week on Monodroid. These are the solutions I discovered to my problems.
Xamarin and Android – Specific Solutions to Specific Problems #1
At our company, I am the soul that has been tasked with doing our Android development. We have chosen to use Xamarin for this and as I race up the learning curve, I thought it pertinent to start blogging the solutions to any problems I encounter along the way. Welcome to my “Specific Solutions to Specific Problems” series…
Xamarin and Resource.Designer.cs
I am doing a lot of development using Xamarin for Android and while most of the time it works really well, there are a few circumstances where it acts a little weirdly.
The first is when naming resources. The Xamarin documentation states the following in a resource on their website:
[blockquote source=”Xamarin”]Also, it’s important to note that while Android only supports lowercase filenames for resource items, Xamarin.Android is a bit more forgiving; it will support both uppercase and lowercase filenames.[/blockquote]
While this is true for most items it doesn’t work across the board. Continue reading
Why is my Nokia Lumia 920 bubbling?
I recently bought a new phone and passed on my old Nokia Lumia 920 to my wife. She has a strong opinion on the use of cases for phones, especially when we have little kids playing with them. In order to placate her I purchased a wallet style leather case and put the phone in it. She was really happy as the case came with some inserts that she could store credit cards in and use it as a pseudo wallet when she couldn’t be bothered carrying around her hand bag.
Then my wife started complaining about the phone making these strange bubbling noises. I laughed it off and took the phone in order to listen for myself. I flipped open the case and sure enough the phone started bubbling! It was actually quite a pleasant sound but the curious side of me couldn’t just let it go. I searched high and low in the phone settings but couldn’t find anything that would be causing it.
I turned instead to Google and found this thread with some posters describing a noise as “it sounds like Tiny Bubbles…”. That’s it! That’s the noise!!! Further on in the thread people linked the noise to NFC and I realised that my wife had put a credit card with Pay Pass in the wallet case. Whenever she opened the wallet she flipped the cover around to the back of the phone to use it. This of course put the Pay Pass chip at the back of the phone and activated Tap and Send.
Since my wife cares about NFC about as much as I care about putting the seat down on the toilet, I have disabled Tap and Send for now. Happy wife, happy life…
First you get the Console Debugger, then you get the power, then you get the woman…
Alrighty, here’s the situation. You deploy some code to a production or test environment and when you run it up for the first time it crashes. You spin up DebugView and you see this bad boy in the log:
[syntax type=”html|php|js|css”][3820] System.AggregateException: One or more errors occurred. —> System.Reflection.ReflectionTypeLoadException: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.[/syntax]
This is one of the most annoying exceptions to see on production box, especially when you don’t have access to a debugger. With a debugger you can inspect the LoaderExceptions collection and see exactly what assembly it is after but without one your options are somewhat limited. Continue reading
Log me off damn it!!!
One of the coolest new features in the Retail POS for AX 2012 R2 is the ability to host custom controls and entirely change it’s look and feel. These custom controls implement IPOSCustomControl and import a reference to IApplication using MEF. That way you have access to the transaction and can effectively run any POS operation you like. Shane Erstad has written a great introduction to Adding a Custom User Control to the POS if you require further information on the topic.
The problem arises when you first try to use the Log Off operation…
Continue reading
LINQPad. It doesn’t get any more gangster…
I love LINQPad nearly as much as my wife. For quickly mocking up .NET code, debugging OData services or for general LINQ goodness it’s like a Swiss Army Knife. In C# Statements mode all objects and collections are extended with the Dump extension method. This allows viewing of an object or object hierarchy in a way that you’ll never beat with Debug.Writelines.
Continue reading
You’re doing it wrong!!! Well some of it at least…
My current role has me involved in several projects utilising the Microsoft Dyanamics AX framework. As part of my work I wanted to use Team Foundation Server to automate a build procedure that wasn’t specifically .NET and would require a custom build template to pull it off. I originally wrote our build templates for other projects using Team Foundation Server 2005. We had never bothered to upgrade them to the Windows Workflow style build templates but had rather utilised upgrade templates to get them to work. I had done a small amount of work with the new style of build templates but I needed to know more so I started doing some serious research on what had changed.
Adding a toolbar button to restore window layouts in VS2010
I use multiple monitors at my place of work to spread my development environment over the largest area possible. I have the code window on my left monitor and all of the other tool windows like Solution Explorer on my right monitor. This gives me the largest amount of work space possible for me to write code with as well as having quick access to the solution explorer and property windows.
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