Here is the text of my Talk about Android at the Summer of Tech Mobile Developers Panel tonight.
I’m going to be talking about Android for the Summer of Tech Mobile Developers Panel on the 8th of February. This is going to be my first public speaking engagement, and I’m really looking forward to it. Come and support, the discussion should be interesting and informative, and there’s pizza and beer! You need to RSVP on Lil’ Regie.
I have discovered a need to be able to search and replace registry values. I originally thought about using Powershell but after reading this blog post about Powershell performance with the registry, I decided to use .NET. I quickly encountered the idea of using LogParser to read the registry at high speed, and decided this was a fruitful avenue.
Whilst looking through a codebase, I saw implementations of IEqualityComparer<>. After thinking to myself that the need to create an entire implementation of IEqualityComparer<> per use creates quite a bit of boilerplate for such a small amount of signal, I realised that creating a generic implementation of IEqualityComparer<> that takes a definition of equality in its constructor would be very simple.
I’ve once again lost a decent sized chunk of text in a textarea, due to a browser crash. I’ve started wondering about whether browsers should implement autosaving for textareas. Our usage patterns have got to the point where we use browsers to write large chunks of text on a regular basis.
I’ve been thinking on and off about the appropriate return signature for a method that returns an immutable list of objects, sparked off by reading Eric Lippert’s article, Arrays considered somewhat harmful, and my belief that the value of functional program and growth of parallelism means that immutability is desirable most of the time.
However, once you decide to return an immutable collection, what type do you return?
It’s a waste of processor cycles and user time to make web service calls to systems that are not currently functioning. I was involved in building a solution that allows code that depends on non-functioning systems to be skipped entirely. Code simply needs to be attributed with the systems it uses. Then a policy injection handler will throw an exception without even calling that code if a system is known to be unavailable.
If you’re going to choose a single mobile platform to develop for in the next year, there are three main alternatives: Android; iPhone; and Windows Phone 7. It’s my belief Android is the platform for developers new to mobile to choose, unless you have an overriding reason to look at the other platforms.
Android’s Intent resolution can find Activities to act on a datatype. But using this resolution, a single activity can’t consume a datatype in multiple ways.
