Microsoft Press free eBooks

I recently bumped into some free eBooks from Microsoft Press covering these subjects:

• Programming Windows Phone 7 – Charles Petzold
• Moving to Visual Studio 2010 (10 chapters) – Patrice Pelland, Pascal Paré, and Ken Haines
• Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (10 chapters) – Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner
• Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (6 chapters) – Mitch Tulloch
• Own Your Future: Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft (8 chapters) – Katherine Murray
• Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 (9 chapters) – Charlie Russel and Craig Zacker
• First Look Microsoft Office 2010 (14 chapters) – Katherine Murray
• Deploying Windows 7: Essential Guidance (10 chapters) – Windows 7 Resource Kit and TechNet

Oxfam Trailwalker 2011 Training Update 2

• Oxfam Trailwalker event page
• Blood, Sweat & Beers team page
• Endurance walk – previous post from 3rd April 2011
• Oxfam Trailwalker 2011 Training Update – previous post from 27th April 2011

Ok, so we’re nearly there.

The Blood Sweat & Beers team has just completed the last of its big training sessions for the Oxfam Trailwalker 2011 endurance walk challenge on July 16th and 17th. We are now in ‘taper time’, keeping active, but doing no more big training sessions.

We will be attempting to walk 100 km (or 62.5 miles) in a little over 24 hours in order to raise funds for Oxfam’s poverty relief work and to support ex-Gurkhas. A while back we set our fundraising goal to be £2000, which delightfully has been met through generous donations, but we are still looking to improve on the total and will appreciate any additional sponsorships.

This post is the final pre-event update to show how our training has come along as we prepared for the big weekend.

“Project Cooper” Mandelbrot set calculation

I’ve had a couple of people ask me on separate occasions to show some “Project Cooper” code. I’ve not posted any thus far, as the product is quite early in its beta cycle and very few people have access to it. When it has matured and is in more hands I have plans to write lots more on the subject, but since I’ve been asked, I thought I’d post a simple project.

The ever-popular Mandelbrot set is the subject of this little demo, and it’s just a simple console application, completely bypassing the Android support, just building an app that runs on the Java VM.

A dictionary of new words (kind of)

English is a massive language. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition has about 600,000 words in it and that doesn't include the similar number of technical and scientific terms that aren't listed.

In the early days of the language's evolution the mass of words was helped along by England having an influx of peoples and languages from many lands and this helped grow the number of different terms for the very same thing.

Podcast on “Project Cooper”

I recorded a podcast recently for RemObjects, and was interviewed by their technical evangelist Jim McKeeth. We talked about various things including Java, .NET, Mono and Mono for Android, but the chat was mostly focused on “Project Cooper”.

You can find the podcast on the RemObjects Radio site.

Fun & games with OpenGL on Android

I've been working up some demos for Project Cooper to show it working well with the Java class libraries and with the Android SDK. Most recently been trying my hand at getting some OpenGL demos going. I've briefly bumped into OpenGL over the years, but have by no means become a dab hand at navigating the mass of calls in the library and so have been finding the OpenGL documentation invaluable. To help me get something working I've been following steps in books and looking at demos found online.

One demo in a book I have involves a spinning cube (a popular type of demo), that has an image used to texture each side of the cube, and also makes the cube transparent. It's a nice looking demo for sure. I cobbled the code into a Project Cooper application and tested it out and was left very puzzled. You see, the demo ran just fine on the Android emulator. But on my shiny HTC Desire the cube had no bitmap texture on it - the cube was bare!

So the challenge was to find out why a well-performing physical Android device was beaten by the meagre emulator. The solution was found using logging, documentation, the Android source and some general web searching.

Decompiling Android package resources

Sometimes you see a screen in an Android app and you think to yourself: "I wonder how that layout was achieved..."

An initial thought, especially once you realise that .apk files are just ZIP archives, is to just pull the layout xml file out and take a peek. Alas this thought gets you not very far at all as the .apk has the constituent files encoded or tokenised or somehow made unreadable and unusable.

It turns out that apktool is the answer here as it can unpack the resources and decode them into original format so you can browse the layout (as well as the other packed resouces).

Don't forget to read the "Installation for noobs" section - I missed that to start witha and so got stuck for a while. However I'd put the two downloads into a a dedicated directory on the path, rather than the Windows directory, but that's a personal choice.