C2DM Presentation a Success

Today (and yesterday) was the 1DevDay conference in Detroit and it seemed to have been a resounding success.  There were some pretty powerful keynotes about resolving to not try but do, treating your career like a business, moving beyond the comfort zone of your usual programming language and more.  Included in the luminous presentations at 1DevDay was my presentation on Cloud 2 Device Messaging.  I think my presentation went pretty well.  I had a decent audience and things were well received.  I sped through things pretty quickly but didn’t get any complaints.

I did hit one hick up with my demos though.  The demos were both based off of the boiler plate App Engine Connected Android project template that you get access to when installing the Google Plugin for Eclipse.  The first demo (a) is the exact project template.  The second demo (b) has a small amount of added logic to change the background color of one of the UI views depending on the message received.  For some reason, while registering the Android application with C2DM worked fine, sending the messages from either the debug instance of App Engine or the production App Engine instance worked but the messages didn’t get to the emulator.  As you can imagine, I was pretty peeved that the whole purpose of the demo wasn’t actually working.  Knowing that I had experienced other issues with corporate networks messing with things before, I pulled out my Droid 2 and tethered it to my computer.  Instantly, all the messages arrived.  That just goes to remind you to test in the exact environment you’ll be in during you presentation before you actually give it. 

You can find the slides here.  The last slide in the deck has the links to the two demos as well.  If you have any questions or need help getting things work, feel free to get in touch with me.