Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Switching to Android Studio

I thought Xamarin.Forms and Visual Studio would be a mature and stable development environment for developing apps for Android, iOS and UWP. I was wrong.

First, as I wrote in the previous post, it does not work to start the Android Emulator from within Visual Studio. I filed a bug report towards Visual Studio and was informed that the development team is aware of the issue and are planing to release a fix on the 15.8 branch of VS. Not very prioritized to fix apparently.

Second, Xamarin.Forms defaults to using a shared project for the common, not target specific, source files. Shared C# projects uses the new .NET project system by default. The support for XAML and code behind files still has problems in the new system. So, adding new XAML files to your project will not work from within Visual Studio, manual editing of the project files are needed. Also the static code analysis does not work well with XAML files in the new project system so you will get a lot of false errors.

Third, building the Xamarin.Forms projects when targeting Android is painfully slow. It takes minutes to re-compile even a minimal change. I did some tests with Android Studio and similar changes takes a couple of seconds to re-compile compared to minutes with Xamarin.Forms.

Ok, so a lot of complaining. What to do about it? Well, since I don't need multi-platform support right now (I am only targeting Android), I searched for the recommended development suite for just Android and found Android Studio.

Android Studio, as the name implies, is solely meant to be used for building Android apps. If the Android Emulator can't be started from within Android Studio, that will be top priority to fix. Also the build times are A LOT faster than what I experienced with Xamarin.

I will have to code in Java instead of C#, but that's no biggie. Will write more on Android Studio once I have made some more progress on the app.

Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Does TDD really improve software quality?

I have asked myself this question several times, and searched for answers, without coming up with any clear answer. Therefore I have decided to go hard core TDD for a longer period of time (at least 6 months) to really evaluate the effects. There are several things that I find confusing when it comes to TDD. One example is what actually defines a unit test. What is a "unit" anyway? After reading a bit about it I found a text claiming that the "unit" is "a unit of work", i.e. something quite small. Like converting a string to UPPERCASE or splitting a string into an ['a','r', 'r', 'a', 'y'] of chars. This work is usually performed by a single call to a single method in a single, isolated, class. So, what does it mean that a class is isolated? Does it mean that it doesn't have any dependencies to other classes? NO! In the context of TDD it means that any dependencies are supplied by the test environment, for exa...
3 kommentarer
Läs mer

Codility tasks - Part I

I was recently faced with two codility tasks when applying for a job as an Embedded Software Engineer. For those of you who arn't familiar with Codility you can check out their website here:  www.codility.com Task one - Dominator The first task was called Dominator. The goal was to, given a std::vector of integers, find an integer that occurs in more than half of the positions in the vector. If no dominator was found -1 should be returned. My approach was to loop through the vector from the first to the last element, using a std::map to count the number of occurences of each integer. If the count ever reached above half the size of the vector I stopped and returned that integer and if I reached the end without finding a dominator I returned -1. So was that a good approach? Well, the reviewer at the company rated the solution as 'pretty ok'. His preferred solution was store the first integer in the array and set a counter to 1. Then loop through the remaining i...
7 kommentarer
Läs mer

Codility tasks - Part II

Now, the second codility task I was faced with was a bit tougher. The goal was to create a function that, given a vector of integers A and an integer K, returned the number of integer pairs in the vector that, when added, sums up to K. Let me give you an example. Assume that you are given a vector A = [0, -1, 3, 2, -5, 7] and K = 2. Possible combinations to get K are (0, 2), (-1, 3), (3, -1), (2, 0),  (-5, 7), and (7, -5). In other words, the function should return 6. Now, how did I solve this task? The first solution that came to mind involved nested for-loops. The outer loop picking one integer at the time from the vector and the inner loop adding the integer to the others one by one to see if the result is K. This solution works, but it does not scale well. Time complexity will be O(N**2) ,   something that for large vectors will result in very long execution times. My second approach was to use my old friend, the integer counter, and count all occurences of each...
2 kommentarer
Läs mer