Chris Risner . Com

Join me for DevChat

Posted on: 6/7/2013 10:12:00 PM by Chris

I’m happy to let everyone know that I’m participating in a #DevChat this coming Tuesday, June 11th at 11am PST. This is a great opportunity to get the answers to any questions you might have about developing iOS and Android applications with Windows Azure, cross platform development with Mobile Services, and going mobile with the cloud. I’ll try and post a wrap up of all the important questions and answers here after the #DevChat.

We’re excited to have Chris Risner as our guest for the next #DevChat, Tuesday, June 11^th at 11am PST. Chris works as a Technical Evangelist for Microsoft focusing on iOS and Android connectivity with Windows Azure. He will be discussing iOS and Android app development with Windows Azure Mobile Services and mobile connectivity with the cloud. Chris is passionate about cross-platform development with Mobile Services and helping others with their projects. This is a great opportunity to learn more about cloud capabilities for your mobile apps.

Please join us this Tuesday, June 11^th at 11am PST to learn about cross-platform mobile development, cloud integration and Windows Azure Mobile Services.

How #DevChat works:

· Follow and participate in the conversation with the Twitter hashtag #DevChat.
We’ve set up a TweetChat “room” that you can use to participate here: http://tweetchat.com/room/DevChat

· You may also use Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, or another third-party Twitter client to monitor Twitter. If this is the case for you, you’ll just need to set up a column with the hashtag #DevChat.

· Join in any time during the hour. We look forward to having your share your questions and contribute your knowledge and opinions.

· We will ask a series of questions, each beginning with “Q1,” “Q2,” and so on.

If you’d like to answer a question, just tweet back with “A1,” “A2,” etc. to the corresponding question.

· Most of all, #DevChat is about learning, and sharing insights and experiences with your fellow developers, while having access to industry experts.

Join us on Tuesday, June 11 at 11am PST.

Categories: Android, Azure, iOS, Mobile Services

First Article

Importing the Mobile Services Quick Start App into Android Studio

Posted on: 5/28/2013 2:34:00 PM by Chris

I’ve been playing around with Android Studio a lot lately and wanted to try it out with the Windows Azure Mobile Services quickstart application. Unfortunately, when I first imported the project, I ran into an issue with all of the source files. The specific issue that Android Studio (and IntelliJ, and Ant, and anything that isn’t Eclipse) is reporting is illegal character \65279 at the beginning of each of the .java files. The reason for this was fairly difficult to track down. If you download the quick start application from GitHub, you won’t run into the issue. If you download the Android SDK for Mobile Services and import that, you won’t see it either. It turns out that the issue is the process that takes the quick start app in GitHub and merges it with your Mobile Service (i.e. sets the project name, the Mobile Service URL, the application key, etc). For some reason, it’s changing the formatting so that an invalid character is at the start of each of the source files. If you open any of the files inside of Android Studio (or Eclipse for that matter) you won’t actually see that invalid character at all:

Poor formatting not showing up

Here it looks like the first character is the “p” in package. However, this isn’t the case. If you open the file in notepad, you still won’t see anything out of the ordinary. As of right now, the only program I’ve been able to successfully fix the issue in is nano. If you open each of the source files in nano you’ll see there is an extra space at the beginning:

Badly formatted file

As you might guess, that isn’t really a space. If you go in and delete that character and save the files, everything will build fine no matter what IDE you’re using. This has been passed on to the team so hopefully we’ll get it fixed in the near future.

If you happen to find another editor (especially a Windows friendly one) that makes it easy to edit and fix the files, please let me know in the comments

First Article