Highcard Game: First App in the Marketplace

At QFrame, we are very proud to announce that as of today, we've got our first app up and running in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

It is a very simple game, based on the drawing of cards, which can be played from 2 up to 4 players. After a draw, the highest card wins. It is excellent to use if you'd need to decide who needs to do the dishes, who should go for bread in the morning or, who should pay the next round of drinks, ...

This little experiment thought us a lot about the basics of Windows Phone development and about the approval process. We were revoked at first for the marketplace, since we only took a dark background into account. This was an easily fixed issue, though.

So, if you're interested, go and download it to your phone, and let us know what you think about it.

RTFM: First MonoDroid Steps

This will be a short post on my first experiences in using MonoDroid. It will primarily be a small list of the mistakes I made in getting a simple app to run on a configured device. This actually didn't work quite as easy as I thought it would.

I started with following the download and installation instructions for Visual Studio 2010 on the Xamarin site. Clicking all the SDK's and packages you need to download and installing all of those.

First error I made here is, they indicate at their site you need to install the Android SDK on a path with no spaces in it. This recommendation, actually, is one you should follow. If you install the Android SDK in the regular Program Files location, the Visual Studio plugin won't be able to find the SDK. That's the first mistake that made me have to reinstall the Android SDK.

After reinstalling the Android SDK, just check if the new path is filled out correctly under Tools - Options - Mono for Android in Visual Studio. If it is not, fill it out and restart your Visual Studio (and recheck if it is filled out correctly).

Another handy option here is the Adb logging option, which puts a log file on your desktop, so you can see a bit what's going on if things go terribly wrong.

That done, I tried to run the default project that's created when you start a new MonoDroid project. This failed miserably. I kept getting the error message that my activity could not be found: "Activity class {\} could not be found". I struggled quite some time with this error, figuring the mandroid process must have created an incorrect package name or maybe created an incorrect folder structure under my obj folder of the project. Whatever I tried, nothing worked:

• renaming folders,
• renaming the namespace, 
• renaming the project, 
• creating my own AndroidManifest.xml file
• ...

After a lot of hair pulling and rereading the installation instructions and the first tutorial for the 100th time, my eye fell on the Java SDK version they recommended you download. You should install version 6, but if you click the link for downloading this, you get the download site for version 7. After uninstalling version 7, googling for version 6 and installing that one I finally could get the tutorial app deployed on an Android device.

Another error I thought I made along the way, is one I made out of laziness. While downloading the Android SDK I got tired by the size of the download, skipping it and only downloading the latest version (3.3 at the time of writing). And apparently MonoDroid doesn't support this latest version (yet). So installing revision 8 and configuring an Android device for this, made it all ok. But on the other side, deploying to the 3.3 version after I got revision 8 to work, went just fine. The only problem is that your UI gets stretched, because the 3.3 device is a tablet device. I still need to figure out how you can set op MonoDroid for bigger screens.

Cross Platform Mobile Development

At this years NDC conference, I followed a couple of talks about mobile development. It was announced there that the people behind MonoTouch and MonoDroid were moving to a new company named Xamarin. Well, as of yesterday, they have actually made the move and all sources for doing cross platform development can be found at their site.

They are actually providing a really cool way of doing cross platform development. You don't need to learn a whole lot of Objective-C or Java to develop applications for iPhone or Android, but you can develop in C# .Net, the language you use for doing Windows Phone 7 development. The only thing you still need to provide, that is specific for the iPhone and Android devices, is the user interface specific for each device. If you develop your applications wisely, though, - that is, using one of the MV* patterns - this is a walk in the park.

For iPhone development you will need a MAC, because the iPhone SDK only works on iOS. You can then install Mono and MonoDevelop (instead of Visual Studio) for OSX to start developing. For people like me, who are used to tools like ReSharper, you will, however, again need to learn how to type.

For Android development, the Java SDK is needed, and again MonoDevelop or Visual Studio 2010. With some handy project linking in Visual Studio, you can easily provide a shared code base for all three platforms. On this, watch the NDC talk, by Jonas Follesoe, about cross platform development!

The good news also is, that Xamarin offers both MonoTouch and MonoDroid as a free trial version that doesn't expire. The only drawback to the trial is that you can't deploy to actual iPhone or Android devices, only to their respective emulators. But this should be enough to get you started. Once you want to try out specific features the emulators don't offer (like gps, camera, ...) you will need to move to a paid license (or once you want to deploy to the marketplace, that is).

You will however need a little bit of extra effort if your initial WP7 projects are hosted on TFS. MonoDevelop for now does not offer a build in way for synchronising projects with TFS. You can use Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere 2010, which offers a command line utility for connecting to TFS. Also SvnBridge gives you an SVN kinda way for connecting to TFS. And also, you could move your code base to SVN or GitHub (I love that place, not only for its name) alltogether.

This weekend there is also the MonoSpace conference in Boston going on, specifically for Mono development. They have a couple of sessions on mobile development as well. I hope they will put videos on-line of their talks.

Since I don't own a MAC (yet), I will try out the MonoDroid SDK in the next couple of weeks. Be sure to check back in to watch the progress (and the walls I will probably hit).

NDC 2011

Last week some colleagues and I went to the NDC conference in Norway.

Apart from the weather, which was crappy, it was an awesome conference. I've seen some great talks and am looking forward to watching some of the talks I missed (because I was in another session) online. I also went home with some new great ideas for books I want to read:

• Introducing HTML 5, by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp. They gave the HTML 5 talks during the second day of the conference in a small and very crowded room. They convinced me even more of the amazing things you can do for web pages with the new upcoming standard. It was a relieve as well to hear someone from the Opera browser team talking about HTML 5 instead of the standard Microsoft talks I heard thus far. 
• Test-Driven JavaScript Development, by Christian Johansen. Too bad his talk was given simultaneously with Rob Ashton's (Document databases with ASP.NET MVC), Kevlin Henney and Anders Norås's (Introducing The FLUID Principles) and Hadi Hariri's (Dynamic in a Static World). I went to this last session, which was very good. It gave me some ideas and examples of more things I can start doing with dynamic. I would really like to try to get a DSL written with it (I would probably start off by copying a Ruby example, since it is not easy stuff). The talk about the FLUID principles was very good as well, my colleagues went to that one and it is one of the talks to catch on rerun, once they put the videos up. I did follow the talk about the SOLID principles, which was nice to refresh again. I went to the RavenDB by Example talk on day  3 of the conference. It was a good thing the speaker also mentioned some of the problems he had with a document database, having to rethink the design of your data as opposed to relational databases.
• The Joy of Closure, by Michael Fogus and Chris Houser. I didn't get to catch any of the Closure and F# talks and it would be nice to get up to speed with this. Also something to watch on rerun and see what we can do with it
• 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, by Kevlin Henney and 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, by Richard Monson-Haefel. I only went to Kevlin's talk about the 101 things he learned in architecture school, which was light, but enlighting. His other two talks apparently were very good as well, as my colleague went to those.
• Specification By Example, by Gojko Adzic. His talk wasn't so good, but I think a lot can be learned from this book. One thing I will really remember from the conference is the multiple question marks that speakers had with BDD, DDD and agile. While they are all good techniques, they have their flaws and the software community really needs to figure out how we can do these things even better. Gojko's post on his blog about one of these talks really explains the problem a bit as well. He also mentioned our Cronos colleagues from iLean in his talk, which I think was pretty cool. And he is also one of the creators of cuke4ninja, a port of cucumber for .Net.

Apart from those books and talks I already mentioned, I also followed some of the talks on mobile development. The ones about multi platform development were really informative. The MonoTouch and MonoDroid projects have moved from Novell to Xamarin and are planning on a next release in the coming months. Biggest take-away there was: use the latest MonoTouch and MonoDroid builds for now and switch to the Xamarin builds once they are published. Jonas Follesoe's talk on this topic was great, if you're doing mobile, catch it on rerun! 

I also really liked the AOP talks given by the PostSharp people. They have a great framework for doing AOP, which is really powerfull and which gives you a lot of cool features for keeping your code nice and, well, sharp. They also mentioned some other AOP frameworks, which I think is a nice gesture, since they are not the only ones out there.

The CQRS talk by Fredrik Kalseth was inspiring as well, although he only mentioned one part of CQRS. It was explained really well and can be used as a basis on future projects. I also learned in his talk that JetBrains have a Ruby IDE which I didn't know about. As I look at their site now, I see they're also working on an Objective-C IDE. 

So, all in all, a very good conference, which I hope to catch again next year, and hopefully without the rain. I learned a lot and have now a whole lot of stuff to read and learn even more about. Too bad there's only 24 hours in a day (of which I really need 9 to sleep, since I'm a sleepy head).

Thanks as well to my colleague, Guy, for providing some very nice pictures. You can find the entire collection here.