Exploration of Thought

I'm using db4o for a persistence store in an Android app since db4o allows FREE usage in Android apps I decide it would be a good fit. Until I ran into the an error I could not get around for a couple of weeks. Over the last couple of weeks I've been dealing with an…

This may be easy to remember for others (and I'm sure I'll remember it eventually) but here is... When I mouse over a call, I want the java-doc to be presented so that I can see what the api options/docs are. Just referencing the jar is not enough. Here's what you have to do after…

A couple of days ago I threw out a poll on twitter to see what people thought of a particular question I had in mind. Here it is:   What I'm after is pretty simple ... how should one handle exceptional cases in Web Api development. Namily JSON and XML. My take on it is…

There's a problem in the Android UI world and its really starting to bother a lot of people (from what I'm reading online and from conversations I'm having with other Android users). Every company that develops Android hardware believes they can make the UI "better" then the default UI. A few of the offenders include:…

Over the last year I've been asked quite a few times: Hey,I'm going to Android, which phone/device should I get? It's a pretty easy question to answer ... Buy the best phone you can afford. The reason for this response is because essentially you're buying something you want to Enjoy Be Happy With Have For…

Sometimes your task in MVC involves many buttons in the same form. Such as the screen shot here. What happens in most situations is that you end up having some code that kind of looks like this: ... and then the code looks like this We can solve this with a little jQuery. By attaching…

Thank you for coming to the Introduction to Android Development at the Desert Code Camp Today. Below you'll find today's code and presentation: Code: http://github.com/donnfelker/Agilevent-Demo Presentation: (coming later today)

I'll be presenting "Introduction to Android Development" and "ASP.NET MVC2 with the Spark View Engine". Sign up for yopur sessions here: http://www.desertcodecamp.com If you're in the area, I hope to see ya there!

I'm working on a couple of projects that interact with REST api's and consume JSON data and in doing so I use the DefaultHttpClient from apache, located in the Android framework. The Error Last night I was working on a project and kept getting this error: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Target host must not be null, or set…

I'm in the middle of writing some unit tests (jUnit) and I'm testing that my parsing/etc is working correctly from a JSON data source. However, this HUGE JSON data structure needs to be escaped. I was spending about an hour escaping this complex JSON string until I said "screw it, there has to be a…

Episode 2 of my TekPub series, Introduction to Android is now live on TekPub.com! If you want a sneak peak at some of the material I cover in the series and you're in the Midwest area come on by my Developing for Android session at the Iowa Code Camp this Saturday.

Certain parts of ASP.NET MVC can be a real pain to test. Namely Model Binders, Action Filters and anything that relies on some magic "Context" that seems to derive from HttpContext, ControllerContext, RequestContext, etc. Below, I've outlined how I've unit tested a Action Filter. You could extrapolate some of this code into a base Test…