Willem's Fizzy logic

Today Xamarin released a new version of Mono for Android, the C# tooling for building apps on Android devices. The new release features a ton of new and old stuff that got improved. There’s quite a few things in there that will make many developers happy for sure.

In this post I will give you a very short runthrough of what’s there and why I think it is good to have.

Visual Studio 11 beta is taunting you, with its new support for async and await keywords. All you have been wanting to do is use those keywords to finally clean up the mess you produced building an API that is completely async. Sadly, there’s no way you are going to be able to use the keywords until the third party tools, you are using are updated or your boss tells you that Visual Studio 11 is RTM and can be used in the company.

This is the scenario where I am in right now, well for the first part that is. The second part is not a problem, since at the office we’ve already ditched Visual Studio 2010 and moved on to Visual Studio 11 for its new build features and TFS server features. However if you’re like me, doing Mono for Android development you might want to read on.

Web development is an environment that is somewhat evil. There’s a whole bunch of very dynamic languages out there that make you want to pull out your hair. Some of it is fixable, like taking a class in Javascript (which I did last week, to finally get my head around it). Other things are not so easily fixed.

The little piece of work I did on the Web API routing system seems to have caught on with a few people on the internet. I’m getting questions on twitter and this blog on a number of things related to the attributed routing addon I created.

So here’s a short list of the questions I got.

Yes, I’m a geek and a very bad case too. I love coding alot and I love making user interfaces the most when coding. The Last Seats app is one of my finest examples of making a cool user interface.

But I do have other hobbies Like photography. You can find me outside at least a couple of times a week, playing around with my Canon 5D Mark II. I shoot mostly landscapes, but sometimes I like to experiment a bit and shoot other things.

Web development has my attention, the guys at Microsoft somewhat surprised me with the speed at which they innovate on the ASP.NET platform with the new Razor pages, ASP.NET MVC 4 and Web API.

Web API is a new framework that you can use to build RESTful services for your webapplication. It’s a very powerful framework that allows you to customize a lot of stuff without sitting in the way too much. For example, you can customize the way the urls for your RESTful services are layed out by applying custom routes.

In this post I will show you how the routing system for Web API works and what I did to improve the experience a bit.

My boss has lend me a Galaxy Tab which I am (with a greatful heart I can tell you) punishing with some Mono for Android tryouts. Although I wasn’t a big fan of Android Tablets at first I’m starting to like it now I know what I can do to it. There’s a lot more pixels I can use, so it opens up a whole new universe of possibilities.

In this article I’m going to show you one of the latest discoveries I did on the tablet. A lot of developers already know this feature, called the action bar. It’s a user interface pattern widely applied in the Android ecosystem. On versions of Android prior to v3.0 you needed to build the action bar yourself using a custom linear layout and a bunch of code. Very ugly and hard to maintain. But version 3.0 and up however support the action bar out of the box with a rich set of features. It makes things a lot easier, that’s for sure.

Microsoft finished processing the video for our mobile sessions a few days back. You can watch it either here or on their website. They did a pretty good job on the overall look of the video I must say.

Techdays 2012 is sadly over, I had a blast with Marcel de Vries and Roy Cornelissen talking about how you can build multiplatform apps using Mono* and WP7 tools. A lot of people showed up at our session, so much even that they had to close the room and ask people to watch the session on the monitors outside the room.

You can find the session slides here by the way: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16850010/Developing%20iPhone%2C%20Android%20and%20Windows%20Phone%207%20applications%20with%20C%23.pdf

Some of you may already have noticed. I am working on a small app of my own. The Journeys app is a small utility to keep track of my hiking habits. You can see how long you’ve been walking and where you’ve been. There’s even a chart showing the distance you’ve traveled.