Today’s bug is again sponsored by Mono for Android:

Random “The type or namespace name ‘XXX’ could not be found” errors when building

Mono for Android randomly produces “The type or namespace name ‘XXX’ could not be found” errors when building a solution. These errors don’t really exist and disappear after a rebuild.

Today’s bug is provided by Mono for Android:

NullReferenceException in AppDomain.UnhandledException handler

Today, I’ve been hunting down a bug in Mono for Android (4.4.55). This bug flooded the Android log with this entry (thousands of times):

02-04 17:09:32.010: W/(4300): Bad call to mono_mutex_lock result 11
02-04 17:09:32.010: A/(4300): * Assertion at /Users/builder/data/lanes/monodroid-mac-monodroid-4.4-series/6418373f/source/mono/mono/metadata/loader.c:2181, condition `ret == 0' not met

This flood of log messages made the whole deployment process very slow (54 seconds to deploy a fresh project).

As workaround I found that disabling Use Fast Deployment in the project settings “solved” the problem for me.

I’m still waiting for an answer from Xamarin on this issue. Update: This problem is tracked here.

Currently MonoDroid (or “Mono for Android”) is lacking a unit testing framework. Since Xamarin (the guys behind MonoDroid) enable us to use C# on almost every platform it would be nice to be able to reuse C# unit tests written for Visual Studio on other platforms, such as Android.

This is the goal behind the MonoDroid Unit Testing Framework which can be obtained here:

https://bitbucket.org/mayastudios/monodroid-unittest/

Happy testing!

Mono for Android provides a window to view all Android log messages directly in Visual Studio. However, you can’t copy these log messages.

Since I’m a well-behaved programmer, I filed a bug report for this.

For now, I have to use monitor.bat from the Android SDK’s tools directory to work around this issue.