November 2010 - Posts - More Wally - Wallace B. McClure
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Wallace B. (Wally) McClure.

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Please goy buy 3-4 copies of my book on MonoTouch titled "Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android for .NET/C# Developers." They make great gifts all year round. Plus, I get about $.25 when you buy a copy.

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More Wally - Wallace B. McClure

This blog will have all kinds of posts about Wally McClure. In it, there will be tons of .NET and computer programming posts as well as Wally's views on life in general. As you might guess, this site and blog help you get More Wally in your life. What more could anyone want? iPhone, Android, MonoTouch, MonoDroid, Mobile, HTML5, .NET, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, AJAX, jQuery, jQuery Mobile, ASP.NET AJAX, and Windows Azure............follow me on twitter at Wally

November 2010 - Posts

  • When upgrading an app from .NET 1.x to .NET 4.0............

    There is some pain and agony involved in the upgrade process.  Any upgrade is typically painful in someway.  However, this upgrade was particularly painful.  Why?  We had to make some changes to the UI due to Section 508 issues at the same time.  As a result, the UpdatePanel was being use extensively.  Everything was going along swimmingly, then boom.  One of the new controls wouldn't display correctly.  Thankfully, Peter Blum and I figured it out.  The <head> tag has to have runat="server" attribute.  .NET 1.1 apps that are upgraded don't have this setting.

     BTW, Go BUY and USE Peter's controls. They are really good!   Check out his site: http://www.peterblum.com/.

  • Debugging in MonoDroid

    A few things that I have learned regarding building an app in MonoDroid that I need to remember.

    • Don't try and edit a user interface on your own.  Use DroidDraw or some other tool.  If you don't you will screw it up.  If you go decide to edit by hang, you should at least validate the xml file that contains the user interface.
    • If you get an error like this one:
      Error 1 System.InvalidOperationException: Command failed. Command: C:\android-sdk-windows\platforms\android-8\tools\aapt "package" "-M" "C:\Users\WALLYM\AppData\Local\Temp\si5rzzgo.xf5\AndroidManifest.xml" "-F" "C:\Users\WALLYM\AppData\Local\Temp\si5rzzgo.xf5\resources.apk" "-S" "C:\Projects\MonoDroid\softkeyboards\softkeyboards\obj\Debug\res" "-I" "C:\android-sdk-windows\platforms\android-8\android.jar" C:\Projects\MonoDroid\softkeyboards\softkeyboards\aresgen softkeyboards
      It typically means you mucked up the user interface.
    • If you get an error that makes no sense, try turning up the MSBuild output verbosity level.
    • You can use the ADB android debug bridge.  You can run it in a window and output to a file to keep the values around easily.
    • ADB is built into MonoDroid.  Its in the "other windows" in Visual Studio 2010.
    • If you are debuging on a physical device, make sure that you plug your device in and have it on a wifi network.  Yeah, this sounds funky, but I've been told its true.
    • If you get something like the following error:

      Just do what it says.  You are screwed.  Close your Visual Studio session and then reload it.
  • Why, oh why is pooling turned off in Entity Framework 4.0 with Visual Studio 2010

    I've been working and playing with EF4 ever since it shipped.  I'm really excited by what I see in it.  I started digging into the web.config to see what all is involved with it.  Unfortunately, when I found the entry in the web.config, I was horrified by what I saw.  Here's the line:

    <add name="AppEntities" connectionString="metadata=res://*/App_Code.AppModel.csdl|res://*/App_Code.AppModel.ssdl|res://*/App_Code.AppModel.msl;
    provider=System.Data.SqlClient;provider connection string=
    &quot;Data Source=.;
    Initial Catalog=Example;Integrated Security=True;Pooling=False;
    MultipleActiveResultSets=True
    &quot;" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient"/>

    WTH is this?  Why in the world would I want to turn off my connection pooling?  Seems like a really bad idea to me.  It ends up that this, and other options are from the setup.  When you choose a connection in Visual Studio 2010, the connection is drawn from the Visual Studio 2010's connection string.  Apparently, Visual Studio 2010 turns off connection pooling, I did not know that.  Also, you probably don't want to use Integrated Security for your production apps, only for demos.  These are a couple of things to look at when you setup your apps.

  • Visual Studio Live! Orlando - Nov. 14 to 17

    This is a quick update to let you know that Visual Studio Live! is coming up soon in Orlando (Nov. 14-17). There will be a variety of courses taught by world-class speakers, including Rockford Lhotka, Dave Mendlen, Deborah Kurata, and of course Me! More info on speakers and sessions can be found at http://bit.ly/VSLiveOlndo.

    I want to let you know about the special group discount you can get by registering with 3 or more of your colleagues  - which will save you hundreds of dollars per person off of a 4-day, all-access pass. Register your group at http://bit.ly/VSLiveGrpReg, or you can register individually at http://bit.ly/VSLiveFallReg.

    If you've never been to Visual Studio Live, it offers developers, programmers, software engineers and architects an unbiased blend of practical and immediately-applicable training in Visual Studio, Silverlight, WPF, jQuery, .NET, SharePoint and more. It's a great opportunity to interact one-on-one with rock stars of the Microsoft development team and MVP community while participating in some hard core coding sessions.

2006 - Wallace B. McClure
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