User-friendly concurrency handling in occasionally disconnected systems

Recently i was in a hurry to grab some reading material and i accidently pulled out a book I’ve mentioned previously. David Platt’s “Why Software Sucks” is full of thoughts on how software could be made more user-friendly. One of his points is that users should not have to understand the internal workings of a computer or the particular piece of software, they are trying to use.

Reading this again made me absolutely sure we had come to the right decision in a recent discussion on how to deal with concurrency in an “occasionally disconnected” client / server system.

Why does my phone need a SIM?

Whould it not be easier to just authenticate with a username and password like is done everywhere else?

Imagine:
- Getting a new phone
- Borrowing a friends phone when you run out of juice
- Using a public telephone

Rumours of an actual google-phone (as in hardware designed by google) predicts a dedicated VOIP solution. Thats one of those things that make me go “why is it not allready like that?” (and then “oh – one more area google is going to dominate in a couple of years”).

You have to wonder how long carriers will be able to charge for calls seperately and by the minute. And when can i have a phone that doesn’t rely on a 20 year old SIM card?

Hosting WCF REST in IIS

Hosting a WCF REST service in a console og windows application is made extremely easy by magic that is auto configuration, provided by WebServiceHost. Modifying the standard WCF Service Application Project on the other hand is a little harder as it makes you deal with the horror that is XML configuration

Since this isn’t the first time i find my self searching for the correct way of setting things up, i thought i would throw in a link:

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/smallfish/archive/2008/12/30/how-to-configure-wcf-rest-service-hosted-in-iis-properly.aspx

Setting up the Android Emulator for HTTP debugging using Fiddler2

Fiddler2 is a great way to debug advanced HTTP communication and it can be very helpful in capturing and recreating SOAP messages. Getting up and running with the Android Emulator is pretty easy:

Android and XML De-/Serialization

I don’t have a lot of experience with it yet, but at least for the simple stuff I’ve been doing with the Android port, XStream is a great XML De-/Serializer.

Here’s the Android port: http://jars.de/java/android-xml-serialization-with-xstream

To get started using XStream, go for this easy to follow tutorial: http://xstream.codehaus.org/tutorial.html

There’s no I in standard

Coming from C# I personally prefer the I+DescriptiveInterfaceName (e.g. IList) convention, but that “I” seems to be a bit of a sin within the java community.

Imagine my surprise when I came across android.os.IBinder.

Although I’m just a random hacker using a language like C#, one thing I would always adhere to over my own preference in regards to naming, is a standard. I thought java guys were real sticklers for this kind of thing.

Guess I was wrong

Ready for the Enterprise: Setting up a VPN connection on Android

For my current project I needed access from my HTC Hero to a server that is not publicly visible. To my surprise it turns out that Android currently has NO VPN SUPPORT. Rumors say Donut will bring it and others are pointing to Google integrating a library from a company called Mocana. I did find some “workarounds” for enabling VPN. Common for all of them is the requirement of root access and a cooked ROM – not something that most users are going to be familiar with.

For me this puts a dent in the “enterprise readiness” of Android. And there are other things. Like the lack of support for Kerberos and NTLMv2 – in both the browser and the Java HTTP stack – and the previously mentioned unobtainable permissions.

I really hope that Google irons out these “kinks”. They make an otherwise promising OS hard to recommend.

Android documentation

I really like the Android documentation – it’s quite comprehensive, there’s nice API samples and the getting started tutorials are simple and easy to follow. With each class description, the documentation lists direct and indirect descendants – this is mostly a nice feature, but I couldn’t help smiling when I looked up “Object”: http://developer.android.com/reference/java/lang/Object.html

Android and permissions: Taking a screenshot

I had to do some screenshots for a presentation on the Android project I’m currently working on and to my surprise I found that searching for “Screenshot” on the Android Marketplace turned up zero results actually related to taking a screenshot.

I thought to myself that I would do a “shake to screenshot” app, but quickly realized that it was too good to be true, that nobody had thought of this. So I decided to investigate…

Android: Authenticating via NTLM

As a part of the Android project I just started, I need to access a service secured by NTLM. On Windows Mobile this is handled automatically by WebClient. For iPhone I had to make the move from the more modern and high level UrlConnection / UrlRequest API to the old school non object oriented C style CFNetwork API. Android turns out to be a bit of the same story as with the iPhone. I started out with HttpURLConnection, only to disappointed again and redirected to the Apache HttpClient. But unlike CFNetwork on iPhone, HttpClient actually does not support NTLM “out of the box”…