So it took me 2 hours (downloads on 2mbps included) to create an Android app in eclipse.
Wonder is that something I should be proud of giving I’ve been in software for nearly 15 years now…. 2 hours for a hello world…
Listening to .net rocks and Xamarin podcast got me thinking, I really should see what’s involved in creating an Android app, after all I’m a registered Microsoft and Apple developer, I can create Wp7 apps in my sleep, I’ve even flirted with iOS, why not give Google and Android a shot.
I was going to install MonoDroid for VS2010, but hey i’m doing a hello world, no need for all this cross platformability. I’ve been doing a fair bit of java lately and eclipse doesn’t frighten me anymore so I just downloaded and installed the tools, and created the above app.. baby steps..
Any downsides? yes,, Now I wanna buy a Android tablet 
.
If you’ve upgraded to Entity Framework 4.1 you may have noticed the following no longer compiles. (the line of code that causes the database to drop and recreate on schema change).
Solution
DbDatabase.SetInitializer(new DropCreateDatabaseIfModelChanges<TCF.Models.TCFContext>());
So does your browser support the html5 audio tag when it comes to MP3s?
Browsers in order of my preference
IE9 – Nope
Firefox 5 – Nope, Moreover doesn't gracefully degrade to my fallback text!
Chrome 13 – Sure
Safari 5 – Arguably the best default experience
Try for your self and let me know how you get on (excuse the lack of the DOCTYPE, encoding etc.
It’s quote a catchy song, you’ll miss out if your browser doesn’t support it (or you are not familiar with view source 
)
Darn it but I’ve being doing a lot of Java recently and u know what, I’m no expert but it I think I could even a raise the rating on my C.V. at this stage. My first experience of Java was reading a book back in 2001 belonging to a student friend of mine, the book was lying about so picked it up and read it over the course of a week (yes I had an early addiction to technologies even though I was living in c++ land at the time). I ended up helping with one Final year project a java applet game suite if I remember correctly and in a JBuilder IDE.
Over the years I quickly forgot about my little affair with java and got deeper into c++ which I have to say I loved, around the same time I was having another affair (yes i was a slut) with Microsoft .net beta2. I can’t put my finger exactly on why c# won out for me, but I spent the next few years working on c++ and c#, Java was just something I always left to one side. I always though hey java will be easy, I’ve programmed in c#, same concepts, and moreover I knew c++, so well then c# or java are a walk in the part; while this I guess is partially true, but you’re not prepared you for the curve/slope/cliff you’ve got to climb to learn the IDE and the libraries needed these days.
I’m currently working for a data management company our products are written in java and .net. For the first two years I managed to live in the .net world but lately and mostly due to the success of some of our newer components I’ve been doing quite a lot of java, (a lot more than I ever expected). I’ve also started reading some good books on the subject and you know what I’m as likely to start a test application in Eclipse as I am in VS2010 these days (at least as far as the product components are concerned).
So what’s changed? Well for one the java language is evolving once again which is exciting; so to continue on my smart_ptr series of posts, we can now achieve resource cleanup with java 1.7 with the AutoClosable interface.
For .net people this will be very familiar to IDisposable and the using(var x = new IDisposableDerivedType())
1: File file = new File("input.txt");
2:
3: InputStream is = null;
4:
5: try {
6: is = new FileInputStream(file);
7:
8: // do something with this input stream
9: // ...
10:
11: }
12: catch (FileNotFoundException ex) {
13: System.err.println("Missing file " + file.getAbsolutePath());
14: }
15: finally {
16: if (is != null) {
17: is.close();
18: }
19: }
20:
21: Java 7: Try with resources
22:
23: File file = new File("input.txt");
24:
25: try (InputStream is = new FileInputStream(file)) {
26: // do something with this input stream
27: // ...
28: }
29: catch (FileNotFoundException ex) {
30: System.err.println("Missing file " + file.getAbsolutePath());
31: }
We’re guaranteed that the
is.close(); gets called automatically for us. Have to say I'm a bit jealous that the c# team didn't think of the try() syntax over using.
Ok, forget about mvvm, that’s not the point of this quick post…
Have a look at that, ain’t it a thing of beauty!?
No more having to get back onto the gui thread, even webforms people have to do it with Control.Invoke
(or sync context).
Parallel task library rocks.