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I’ve spent a bit of my spare time in the past week looking at Windows Phone 7 from a developer’s point of view.  I’d have started sooner, but honestly, I didn’t see the point until there were actually devices that I could hold and use.  I know that in the U.S., some guys got developer phones from Microsoft, but I don’t think that anybody up here in Canada was that lucky. So, over the past year or so I’ve been dabbling with Android and I actually like programming for Android. 

Life has been a bit busy as of late.  On Sept 4, 2010 a little monster invaded my house.  A savage beast, suitably evolved for our Canadian winters and a fearless hunter of snow-snakes.  Oh, that, and it turns out that she is a distant cousin to my last dog Bailey.  This is my new puppy Casey, who is just shy of 9 weeks old.

A while ago, I posted a blog article about using IntelliJ for Android development.  Given that was a year ago, and one version of IntelliJ later, I thought I would do a follow up post.  Long story short (and to sound like a TV commercial):  I liked IntelliJ IDEA 9 so much, I bought a license.

Since I blogged last year, the Android plug-in for IntelliJ has really matured.  I guess the only draw back to it is that you only get the Android plug-in when you buy the Unlimited Edition of IntelliJ – it’s not in the Community Edition.  Here are some general comments/thoughts/observations of mine:

Lately I’ve found myself doing a lot more web application development in JavaScript.  Typically, I always seem to fall back on plain old Notepad++ or Visual Studio.  As a developer, the user experience in either is, IMHO, somewhat lacking.

However, for the past week, I’ve been using RubyMine.  RubyMine is a Ruby on Rails IDE from Jetbrains, but it seems to work rather well for editing JavaScript and HTML files.  Plus, as an added bonus, it automatically comes with built in support for jQuery.

I guess I forgot to mention this:  On April 1, 2010, I received an e-mail from Microsoft that my MVP in C# was renewed for the third year.  This makes me a happy, because with Resharper 5 (and therefore Visual Studio 2010) and Windows Mobile 7, I’m hoping that this will be an exciting year for the .NET crowd. 

Well, okay, perhaps I didn’t forget.  Given that it was April 1st when I got the e-mail, I like to give things a few days to settle down.  I am acquainted with some mischievous pranksters who would think it was a funny April Fools joke.

Well, today was a rather sad around the household.  This morning I had to take Bailey, my dog, to the vet to be put down.  She had just turned 14 years old in September of this year, and age had finally caught up with her.  Her hips were going and we were getting concerned that one day she would be stuck on the floor and wouldn’t be able to walk anymore.

At the end of my talk on Git at the Edmonton Code Camp, somebody asked if I would put the links to the various git resources up on my website.  Here they are:

• The git website, of course.
• Pro GIT - an awesome book about git.  You can either order the dead tree version, or read it online.
• Linus Torvalds talking about git.  If you’re an SVN fan-boy, or have thin skin, you might want to skip this.  “…you are ugly and stupid…”
• A fellow by the name of Bart Trojanowksi gave an awesome talk to some Ottawa ruby group.  This is long, but worth it.
• Jason Meredith, of Los Techies fame, has a three part series on git for the Windows Developer.  Jason has some other good git stuff on his blog too.

There you go, enjoy, and be distributed.

One question that has been bouncing around in my mind is what, exactly, does one have to do to be considered Agile?  Let’s look at the Agile Manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

After a bit of tinkering, I managed to provision my ADP1 setup without a SIM card.  A bit of google, and here is what I did

1. Download the Android SDK.  In my case, I unzipped it to C:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1.
2. Connection the phone via the USB cable to my computer.  When the phone asks for a device.
3. You’ll get the new hardware dialog, when prompted for the drivers, you’ll need to specify the location.  The Android SDK has the drivers, in my case they were at C:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1\usb_driver\x86.
4. Once you have the drivers installed cd to c:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1\tools.
5. Type adb devices.  This should list all the Android devices that you have connected.  If you don’t see any devices listed, then you have a problem.
6. Type adb shell.  This will direct your commands to your ADP1
7. Now while at the adb shell, su to root, then : 
8. cd /data/data/com.android/providers.settings/databases/
9. sqlite3 settings.db
10. INSERT INTO system (name, value) VALUES (‘device_provisioned’, 1);
11. .quit
12. Reboot the phone
13. adb shell
14. am start –a android.intent.action.MAIN –n com.android.settings/.Settings

Once all that is done, you should be enable to use your ADP1 as if you had a SIM card in it (we’ll except for the phoning part).

Every developer, no matter how experienced, has to dig in and fix bugs.  This is, in my experience, the typical cycle:

1. bug is reported
2. bug is assigned to developer
3. developer thinks the bug is fixed
4. developer marks bug as resolved
5. tester checks to see bug is fixed, but it isn’t.
6. tester reopens bug, assigns it back to developer
7. back to step number two.  Repeat until developer (or tester) climbs to the top of a 307 foot administrative building with high-powered rifles to demonstrate USMC-worthy marksmanship.

Now, even if you aren’t into the whole Lean Software development philosophy (i.e. eliminating waste), you can probably appreciate that it can be pretty wasteful of time and patience every time that #6 happens, so please indulge me as I elaborate on some of the finer points of bug reporting.