Tag: Android software development

Programming Stuff

Introduction to Cross-Platform iOS/Android Apps with C# and Xamarin

Check out my latest article over on Developer.com

Xamarin is a powerful toolset that brings the rich programming features of .NET and C# to Android and iOS. With Xamarin you are able to create full-featured Android and iOS applications with a shared code base working within a common programming environment. This is part one of a two-part article that walks you through the complete process of using Xamarin to create a simple cross-platform with .NET and C# that runs on both Android and iOS. In part 1, I’ll introduce Xamarin, walk you through the process of creating a cross-platform code library with Xamarin, and guide you through the creation of the Android implantation of the cross-platform app. In part 2, I’ll cover the creation of the iOS implementation…

See the complete article on Developer.com

Programming Stuff

4 Reasons to use Android Fragments (or What Time is it?)

Although Fragments have been part of the Android API for nearly three years, I find that developers still often struggle to understand their value and purpose.

A common explanation of Fragments, and one I sometimes even use myself, is:

Fragments group user interface components and their associated logic.

That explanation is accurate. However, if someone is struggling with how to apply Fragments in a practical sense, that explanation is about as useful as teaching someone how to tell time by explaining the finer details of Swiss watch construction … sometimes you just want to know what time it is…

Read the rest of my post over on blog.pluralsight.com ]

Programming Stuff

iOS/Android/VisualStudio/C#/Xamarin – It’s Looking Up

As you may know, I began digging into Xamarin at the end of last year. It showed a lot of promise as a great way to create cross-platform iOS and Android apps leveraging the existing Visual Studio and C# skills that so many developers have.

When I first started working with it, I did have some initial concerns as I talked about in these 2 blog posts.

I have to say though, once I got past those initial hurdles, things are definitely looking up.

So far I’m doing mostly basic stuff but overall things are going well.

My two main issues are

  1. Visual Studio seems to occasionally have difficulty attaching to the iOS build server
  2. The Visual Studio Android UI designer doesn’t work as well with RelativeLayout as Android Studio does

Neither of these are show-stoppers though.

In the case of connecting to the iOS build server, in most cases restarting Visual Studio takes care of the problem.

For the designer, the Visual Studio designer is workable and if I want to, I can use the Android Studio designer to do the layout work and then just copy it over to the Visual Studio project.

So that’s a long way of saying…

Using Xamarin within Visual Studio is getting a thumbs up so far.

Keep watching as I push on it harder to see how it does as the problem complexity increases.

If you’re interested in doing iOS/Android development with Xamarin, Part 1 of my Pluralsight course series on the topic just went live today…

CrossPlatformiOSAndroidVSCSharpPart1_WithLogo

Programming Stuff

Lambda Expressions in Android Studio

I’m often asked by students from my Android courses as to how I’m able to use Lambda expressions like the following in my Android programs.

Lambda Code Folded

The short answer is: I’m not able to use them. 🙂 What I typed was the following.

Lambda Expanded

The Lambda expressions appear in the editor due to a feature of Android Studio called “Code Folding”.

Android Studio does this sort’a thing in a number of scenarios. You can tell the Lambda expression is a result of code-folding by the highlight that appears over the folded portion of code.

You can also easily identify that the Lambda expression is a result of code folding because the editor will display a plus-sign to the left of the statement. You can view the full, original statement by clicking on the plus sign.

Lamba expression substitution is controlled by the following value in the Android Studio Settings dialog.

Code Folding Settings

As this is my first post of 2014, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone … Happy New Year!!

Programming Stuff

iOS/Android/VisualStudio/C#/Xamarin – Getting a Working iOS Build

I’m happy to report that since my previous post, I am now able to build the iOS app without any difficulty. Thanks again to James Montemagno at Xamarin for his help.

BTW: My apologies for the 4-day gap between posting on the issue. I was out of town and didn’t have my Mac with me so couldn’t do the iOS part of the build.

The reason I encountered errors & warnings when building the iOS project is due to the fact that when the wizard generates the project it does not fill in 3 key fields in the project properties: Application Name, Identifier, and Version. The fields are all blank as shown here.

iOSAppProperties

I filled those in with the appropriate values as shown here…

iOSAppPropertiesCompleted

… and all builds well.

One bit of frustration is that I didn’t see anywhere in the Xamarin Hello, iPhone documentation where it said I had to fill these values in for a valid build.

Near the end of the documentation it does mention that one can edit the plist file using property pages. However, the screen shot shows the Identifier and Version fields empty giving one the impression that leaving them blank is OK.

With those values being so important, I would’ve preferred that Xamarin did one of the following (listed in my order of preference).

  1. Prompt for the values in the project wizard
  2. Default the fields to some reasonable value

In fairness, the error/warning messages do indicate that the values need to be set on the property page. It’s just that after the other headaches I was experiencing, seeing an untouched, wizard-generated project fail to build left me a bit discouraged.

IMHO – When working with a brand new environment, its critical that what comes out of the wizard must build without any errors. So often all one is trying to do is verify that the pieces are working and build errors on untouched wizard-generated projects give one the impression that something is wrong. 🙂

Build Success/Failure

One little thing that surprised me is that Visual Studio is not updating the status bar to indicate that a successful build has completed. In the case of a standard Visual Studio project, the status bar displays a message like the following indicating build success.

VSProjectShowBuildResult

In the case of my VS solution containing the iPhone project, the status bar does not update with a success message as you can see here.

XamarinStatusNoBuildResult

I’ve had to have the Output window open so that I can see when a successful build completes.

Although I haven’t tried to exhaustively diagnose the cause, the lack of a success message appears to be tied to the fact that the solution contains an iPhone project (Xamarin will often display the Mac build host IP Address in the status bar). When I create a solution containing only an Android project, the build result displays in the status bar as expected.

Xamarin.Android Beta Issue

Just to follow up on the issue I mentioned in my last post about the Xamarin.Android Beta breaking Xamarin.iOS in Visual Studio.

The folks at Xamarin have followed up and let me know that there is an incompatibility between the Xamarin.Android version that is currently in Beta and the production release of Xamarin.iOS. To safely install the Xamarin.Android Beta, I’ll need to install the corresponding Xamarin.iOS Beta … A very reasonable requirement.

You can find the bug report and Xamarin’s response here.

I’m not sure if I’m going to do the Beta installs right now or not. I may just wait for them to reach production release. I’ll keep y’all updated if I do decide to install the Betas.

Carrying On

So everything appears to now be working. I can start really digging into things now.

I do want to give Kudos to the folks at Xamarin…

So far every issue I’ve raised whether in their Forums or on their Bugzilla page has been responded to in a very reasonable time frame. Thanks guys!

Programming Stuff

Google Cloud Printing from Android

If you’ve worked with Google Cloud Printing then you know that much of the sample code out there that shows how to submit print jobs using Java or C# don’t work … frustrating to say the least.

After more pain then I’d care to admit, I finally got the code working so wanted to share it.

Below is the code to submit a PDF file for Printing (or storage on a Google Drive) using Google Cloud Printing from an Android device.

For a complete Android Studio project that shows how to interrogate the available printers, get the list of print jobs, and submit a print job download this project zip file.

public class GoogleCloudPrint {
 private static final String SERVICE_SOURCE_NAME = "your-apps-name-for-logging-purposes";
 public static final String GCP_BASE_URL_STRING =
  "https://www.google.com/cloudprint";
 private static final String SUBMIT_URL_STRING =
  GCP_BASE_URL_STRING + "/submit";
 private static final int DEFAULT_STREAMING_CHUNK_SIZE = 0;
 String mUsername;
 String mPassword;
 public GoogleCloudPrint(String username, String password) {
  mUsername = username;
  mPassword = password;
 }
 public void print(String printerId, String title, File documentFile, String mimeType) {
  try {
   byte[] documentBytes = getBytes(documentFile);
   String urlString = SUBMIT_URL_STRING +
    "?output=json" +
    "&printerid=" + printerId +
    "&contentType=" + mimeType +
    "&title=" + title ;
   // Open connection and configure for POST with streaming writes
   HttpsURLConnection connection = createConnection(urlString);
   connection.setDoOutput(true);
   connection.setChunkedStreamingMode(DEFAULT_STREAMING_CHUNK_SIZE);
   // Create the multi-part form data prefix and suffix
   // include filename value in prefix
   String queryPrefix = String.format(
    "------CloudPrintFormBoundaryqeq6g6ncj5v7\r\n" +
    "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"content\"; filename=\"%s\"\r\n" +
    "\r\n", title);
   String querySuffix = "\r\n------CloudPrintFormBoundaryqeq6g6ncj5v7--";
   // Encoide prefix and suffix and determine total content length
   byte[] queryPrefixBytes = EncodingUtils.getAsciiBytes(queryPrefix);
   byte[] querySuffixBytes = EncodingUtils.getAsciiBytes(querySuffix);
   int contentLength = queryPrefixBytes.length + documentBytes.length + querySuffixBytes.length;
   // Add headers for multipart form data and length
   connection.addRequestProperty("Content-Type", 
    "multipart/form-data; boundary=----CloudPrintFormBoundaryqeq6g6ncj5v7");
   connection.addRequestProperty("Content-Length", Integer.toString(contentLength));
   // Write the document to server wrapped as multipart form data
   writePrintBody(connection, queryPrefixBytes, documentBytes, querySuffixBytes);
   // Write results to log
   InputStream inStream = connection.getInputStream();
  } catch (Exception e) {
   e.printStackTrace();
  }
 }
 private HttpsURLConnection createConnection(String urlString) throws IOException {
  String auth = retrieveAuthToken(mUsername, mPassword);
  URL url = new URL(urlString);
  HttpsURLConnection connection = (HttpsURLConnection) url.openConnection();
  connection.addRequestProperty("X-CloudPrint-Proxy", SERVICE_SOURCE_NAME);
  connection.addRequestProperty("Authorization", "GoogleLogin auth=" + auth);
  return connection;
 }
 private void writePrintBody(HttpsURLConnection connection, byte[] prefixBytes,
  byte[] documentByes, byte[] suffixBytes) throws IOException {
  OutputStream outStream = new BufferedOutputStream(connection.getOutputStream());
  outStream.write(prefixBytes, 0, prefixBytes.length);
  outStream.write(documentByes, 0, documentByes.length);
  outStream.write(suffixBytes, 0, suffixBytes.length);
  outStream.flush();
  outStream.close();
 }
private String retrieveAuthToken(String userId, String password) {
  final String AUTHORIZE_URL_FORMAT = "https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin" +
   "?accountType=HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE" +
   "&Email=%s" +
   "&Passwd=%s" +
   "&service=cloudprint" +
   "&source=" + SERVICE_SOURCE_NAME;
  String authorizeURL = String.format(AUTHORIZE_URL_FORMAT, userId, password);
  String auth = "NOT_SET";
  InputStream inStream = null;
  BufferedReader reader = null;
  try {
   URL url = new URL(authorizeURL);
   HttpsURLConnection connection = (HttpsURLConnection) url.openConnection();
   inStream = connection.getInputStream();
   reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inStream));
   String buffer;
   StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
   while ((buffer = reader.readLine()) != null) {
    String[] parts = buffer.split("=");
    if ("Auth".equalsIgnoreCase(parts[0])) {
      auth = parts[1];
      break;
    }
   }
  } catch (Exception e) {
   e.printStackTrace();
  } finally {
   try {
    if (reader != null)
     reader.close();
    if (inStream != null)
     inStream.close();
   } catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
   }
  }
  return auth;
 }
 private byte[] getBytes(File documentFile) {
  byte[] bytes = null;
  try {
   FileInputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(documentFile);
   ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
   byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];
   int n = inputStream.read(buffer);
   while (n >= 0) {
    baos.write(buffer, 0, n);
    n = inputStream.read(buffer);
   }
   inputStream.close();
   baos.flush();
   bytes = baos.toByteArray();
  } catch (Exception e) {
   e.printStackTrace();
  }
  return bytes;
 }
}
Programming Stuff

AnDevCon Slides and Code

Thanks to everyone for attending the AnDevCon Tutorial and Class this week. Here’s the info from both.

Understanding Android Studio and Android Developer Toolset

Integrate Google Cloud Printing Into Your Android App

You must set the user id and password constants in the GmailHelper class or the program will not work

Thank you to everyone who attended. Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

ADCLogo_large

Programming Stuff

Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments gets 5-Star Review

I’m not big on self-promotion but I’ll make an exception as this is an exciting day for me…

My book Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments received its first user review on Amazon and its a 5-Star Review

This book is just what I was looking for. The three pieces I was having issues with were static vs. dynamic fragments, dialogue fragments and backstack management. This book covers all three of these in a manner that has really cleared up my understanding and improved my application design as a result.

Thank you to kbp135 – Here’s the link to the review.

And just in case you’re wondering … the reviewer is not someone I know 🙂

Checkout Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments for yourself. I’d love to hear your feedback.

Creating Dynamic UI with Fragments

 

Also checkout Jim’s Android courses at Pluralsight.

Jim's Android courses on Pluralsight

Jim’s Android courses on Pluralsight

Programming Stuff

Android Developers Earn More Money than iOS Developers

According to recent data, senior Android developers average $131,000 per year versus $121,000 for the same skill level on iOS.

That’s some pretty serious cash!

So what are you waiting for … clearly, it’s time to get your Android skills tuned up! 🙂

The full story is available in this Tech Week article.

Checkout Jim”s Android courses on Pluralsight.

Jim's Android courses on Pluralsight

Jim’s latest book, “Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments” is now available on amazon.

Creating Dynamic UI with Fragments

Programming Stuff

Android for .NET Developers Series Complete!

Part 4 of my four-part series on Android programming for developers with a .NET background just went live today.

UnderstandingTheAndroidPlatform_WithLogo

 

This course delves into the unique features of the Android platform and how those features and the related components affect the way apps are created.

I hope you’ll check out this course and the whole series if you haven’t already seen it. I think you’ll be happy you did.

Here’s the complete series

Part 1: Getting Started

Android for ,NET Developer Series: Getting Started

 

Part 2: Building Apps with Android Studio

Apps with Android Studio

 

Part 3: Adopting the Android Mindset

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Part 4: Understanding the Android Platform

UnderstandingTheAndroidPlatform_WithLogo