I’ve started the process of porting CSLA .NET version 4.1 to MonoDroid. I expected this to be relatively easy because I’ve already got a version of CSLA 4 running on WP7, and from everything I know about MonoDroid it should be pretty comparable (excluding anything to do with XAML and UI concepts of course).
After a couple hours of trying to get the Android emulator to run on my machine, I discovered that the hybrid C++ and Java worlds really don’t “get” Windows. They interpret Windows configuration in different ways. I’m not sure which one is lame and out of date (by around a decade), but either C++ or Java apparently needs help…
Fortunately some googling (with Bing of course ) turned up the answer in the form of an environment setting named ANDROID_SDK_HOME that both C++ and Java will honor. The problem is that my User directory isn’t on the C drive, and either C++ or Java can’t handle this concept. Setting ANDROID_SDK_HOME to the path of my actual User directory solves the issue so the emulator works as expected.
The Android emulator is extremely slow, but functional. Just deploying my tiny little test app takes several minutes, and my computer is no slouch. It is clear that Android developers don’t round-trip very fast in terms of running their code to see if it works. I feel sort of like I’m back in 1992 on a VAX where the compile-link-run cycle took minutes. I’m obviously very spoiled with the performance of things like the WP7 emulator or the ASP.NET development web server, where the compile-debug/run cycle takes seconds (at most).
The process of getting CSLA 4 to at least build in MonoDroid took around 4 hours of work. Not that I’m done, but the code does compile at this point. The holdups and issues are:
Read more: ROCKFORD LHOTKA
After a couple hours of trying to get the Android emulator to run on my machine, I discovered that the hybrid C++ and Java worlds really don’t “get” Windows. They interpret Windows configuration in different ways. I’m not sure which one is lame and out of date (by around a decade), but either C++ or Java apparently needs help…
Fortunately some googling (with Bing of course ) turned up the answer in the form of an environment setting named ANDROID_SDK_HOME that both C++ and Java will honor. The problem is that my User directory isn’t on the C drive, and either C++ or Java can’t handle this concept. Setting ANDROID_SDK_HOME to the path of my actual User directory solves the issue so the emulator works as expected.
The Android emulator is extremely slow, but functional. Just deploying my tiny little test app takes several minutes, and my computer is no slouch. It is clear that Android developers don’t round-trip very fast in terms of running their code to see if it works. I feel sort of like I’m back in 1992 on a VAX where the compile-link-run cycle took minutes. I’m obviously very spoiled with the performance of things like the WP7 emulator or the ASP.NET development web server, where the compile-debug/run cycle takes seconds (at most).
The process of getting CSLA 4 to at least build in MonoDroid took around 4 hours of work. Not that I’m done, but the code does compile at this point. The holdups and issues are:
- MonoDroid doesn’t have ObservableCollection and a set of related types, so I’ve started implementing them myself
- MonoDroid doesn’t know about “Add service reference”, it only knows about “Add web reference”, and that means I need to create a new data portal proxy/host pair
Read more: ROCKFORD LHOTKA