iPhone and MonoDevelop

Seems that initial reports (back in April) about Apple dropping support for anything but Objective-C was aimed primarily against Adobe - and not Novell. So MonoDevelop (w. MonoTouch) can still be the choice development-platform for i(Whatever) applications. Full article (complete with dispelling misconceptions, etc.) stumbled upon here.

Google University - laid back

Who doesn't love Google? Ok, don't answer that! They've recently made course material available to to public. Which is kind of cool since I've established an interest in the Android platform of late - and have been experimenting with the DI containers available for the platform; specifically Gin and Guice. I just know Snoop Dogg would be proud!

Android

I've been disappointed with Windows Phone development tools of late; and am hesitant/resonant  to install over a working copy of Studio 2010. I think it's great that the preview express tools are available - and if I had a spare computer I would probably install them.

Instead I decided to take a look at the Android platform - all things considered, isn't that bad. Up and running quickly on a Linux distro with Eclipse and the SDK in less than 15 minutes! Plenty of resource materials available for the platform and a wealth of Google APIs just waiting to be leveraged.

Java still, unfortunately is the ugly older step-sister of C#, and I miss a lot of the features I've grown to love with the .NET CLR. The Android emulator is great - although it takes 30 seconds to initialize (from a monster machine). Another interesting development is that of MonoDroid; which promises to bring CLR goodness to the platform.

Another funday saturday!

UPDATE:
Interesting work - it really appears to me that anyone working in the enterprise NOT focusing on REST/OData services (sans the Entity Framework - of course!) is living on borrowed time.

(Case in point)

End-users expectations are rising, and they will want their same business applications (to a greater or lesser degree) on their desktops, laptops, tablets and phones.

Why am I wasting time writing this? There are oodles of code to be written.

Of Interest
Restlet and OData
Interop. Services
Sharing is Caring (OData or GData) - or is it?
End-to-end

Clouds without tears?
Lokad Development Tools the Windows Azure Partner of the Year 2010 (June 23rd)

How I came by Lokad
http://abdullin.com/journal/2010/7/29/lokad-cqrs-v1-for-windows-azure-in-september-2010.html

http://abdullin.com/journal/2010/6/12/lokadcloud-vs-lokadcqrs.html

Silverlight in an Occasionally Connected World

And the answer is...anyone?...anyone at all? Microsoft Sync Framework! (I didn't believe it either.)

Until then (roll-your-own) in isolated storage.

Unity + Silverlight 4.0 + VS2010 + Prism = Heartache

Found an issue yesterday that caused me to lose half-a-day. It seems that The latest V4 drop of Prism (including the Unity container) has an issue resolving partial classes. The signature: Container.Resolve[shell]();

Would not compile - at all! Note: for those of you paying attention, replace the brackets with the appropriate greater-than, less-than signs!

It seemed as if the source code was not in sync, which is typically the case with most SL projects. Nope, was absolutely horrendous experience. Turns out someone also "discovered" the issue and promptly when to CodePlex to report it, I'd give them "props" but I am unable to link to the original issue - which for all intensive purposes is not on the site anymore. Curious.

To be fair - I wouldn't typically resolve to a concrete instance anyway, but when dealing with newness, I find it best to take smaller steps! I'm abandoning Unity for present and looking into Ninject to meet my Silverlight needs. Might consider MEF if it wasn't so attribute "dirty". It feels unclean to drive the heart of your composition framework with attributes; also I'm not sure how I feel about the sheer "randomness" of potentially IMPORTING multiple modules within a given view. Silverlight Goodness (with Blendability in mind!) Another funday morning.

iPhone Development with MonoTouch

Worth every penny - enough for corporate types to consider if they really want to start developing for the Apple platform.
Wiki-site
Gps is ridiculously easy
When I think of the pain I've went through - even simpler.
Will it work with Microsoft backends? Well, kinda. The jury is still out, and it's still experimental.WCF Services for iPhone
The best part. They actually support Sqlite intrisically on the phone. Are you listening Silverlight product owners?

Silverlight 4 Hopes and Woes

Woes
A developer from VistaDB posted the following.
the .net framework in silverlight, compact framework, ADO (not!)


A key comment in the blog entry is this:

“I do agree that Silverlight is an underserved market, but I think that is by Microsoft design. They want everything to be service driven and use online services. They appear to be skipping over the local database entirely. I guess your phone is never supposed to be out of range of a tower, or your Silverlight app on a desktop that is offline.”

Really?

And with all the work for Out-of-Browser mode (elevated trust, device support, etc), that never seemed to cross anyone's mind? Ooops, I'm offline. Let me save my work?

Really?

Maybe Sqlite is an option?

Maybe siaqodb is an option?

Really? No-one considered this?

really.

IoC for Silverlight

Ninject vs. Unity who will win in a fight. Right now it seems that Ninject may have a problem with the new Windows Mobile O/S. And I was really rooting for Ninject too!

How to Target Multiple .NET Frameworks

General concerns is that a majority of Open Source projects don't really consider Silverlight.

Now porting existing WPF applications to Silverlight - it really makes you appreciate the fullness of the .NET runtime!

If I continue to be abused by Microsoft I guess there is always Mono although it tends to lag behind the MS expectation and hype.