Google made developing an Android app fairly simple. Everything you need can be downloaded for free from Android’s development site. This includes the Android API, an Android emulator (for running Android apps directly on your computer), and an Eclipse plugin called ADT (Android Developer Tools). However, there’s one thing missing: the Java source code.

The Problem ¶

Despite the fact the Android is (supposed to be) an open source project, the downloads don’t include the source code of Android. So, when opening an Android class in Eclipse, you may see something like this:

To solve this problem you had to manually download the whole Android source code (which contains much more than just the Java source code files) and then manually assemble a source files directory from the Java files scattered throughout the Android source tree. Very tedious and certainly not very simple.

The Solution ¶

Fortunately, there is a Google Code project named “adt-addons” aiming to solve this problem. The project actually consists of several Eclipse plugins, but the one you want is called “Android Sources”. You can either search the instructions on the project page, or follow them (nicely formatted) here.

Basically what you need is to install the “Android Sources” plugin (about 170 MB). Here’s the update URL:

http://adt-addons.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/source/com.android.ide.eclipse.source.update/

After installing the plugin, simply restart Eclipse and the Android source code is already attached to the Android classes.

This is just a note to my self of what Eclipse plugins I’ll use. This list may, however, also be useful to you.

• Subclipse: Subversion support
• MercurialEclipse: Mercurial support
• ExploreFS: This plugin allows you to open a file in Windows Explorer/Finder through the context menu.
• CheckStyle: This plugins allows you define more precise rules for your code style. If a rule is violated, a warning is issued.

• TestNG: Unit testing framework (much like JUnit)

To see what plugins have already been installed, go to Help –> Install new software… and click on What is already installed? at the bottom of the dialog.

In this part of the “Projects in Visual C++ 2010″ mini series another important aspect of C++ programming is explain: precompiled headers. Precompiled headers (or precompiled header files) in many cases significantly reduce the time needed to compile a project.

Here at work I have a C++ project with about 50 .cpp files in it. The project uses the Qt library and all files only include the absolute minimum of header files required. Without precompiled headers, compiling the project takes about 56 seconds. With precompiled headers, the compile time goes down to about 7 seconds. That’s eight times faster.

Related Articles:

• Projects in Visual C++ 2010 – Part 1: Creating a DLL project

• Projects in Visual C++ 2010 – Part 2: Project Dependencies

This article is the second part of the subprojects mini series. The first part was about creating a DLL project. This part will show how to use a DLL library project in another project.

Referencing a library in C++ (or, more specific, with Visual C++) is somewhat cumbersome – or should I say, used to be somewhat cumbersome. Fortunately, with the release of Visual C++ 2010 this has been greatly simplified. This article first shows the old way and then describes the new (simple) way.

Related Articles:

• Projects in Visual C++ 2010 – Part 1: Creating a DLL project

• Projects in Visual C++ 2010 – Part 3: Precompiled Headers

When you write software, you often/sometimes divide your project into several subprojects. This mini series describes how to do this with Visual C++ 2010 (but this first part also applies to earlier versions). We start with creating a library project in form of a DLL.

Related articles:

• Projects in Visual C++ 2010 – Part 2: Project Dependencies

• Projects in Visual C++ 2010 – Part 3: Precompiled Headers

(via xkcd.com)

Nach intensiven Protesten durch verärgerte Apple-Nutzer ist der Bundestrojaner ab demnächst endlich auch für Mac-Computer verfügbar. Der Bundestrojanerbeauftragte beteuerte, die App bereits zur Prüfung an den Appstore übermittelt zu haben. Dort werde überprüft, ob ggf. Urheberrechte verletzt würden oder unzulässige Worte wie “Fuck”, “Bitch” oder “Android” im Quelltext der Anwendung vorkämen.

Sehr lustig. Hier der vollständige Text.

Nicht unbedingt 100% representativ, aber dennoch mal interessant.

(via)

(via FoxTrot)

In Visual Studio when a source code file is changed, the project it belongs to will be built when the whole solution is being built. So far, so good. But what happens if you want some other files (read: non source code files) to have the same behavior?

In my case, I had some translation files (XML files), and a custom build event that converted them into a binary representation. So when one of translation files changed, I wanted this change to trigger a build for the project the translation files were contained in, so that they could be converted into binary form (ie. so that the build event was executed).

Visual Studio (at least version 2010) provides an easy but hidden way to achieve exactly this. After you’ve added the file(s) to your project, right-click them and choose Properties (Alt+Return).

Note: You need to open the properties for the files you want to trigger the build – don’t open the project’s properties. Also, you need to open the “Properties” dialog. You can’t do this from the “Properties” panel (which usually opens up when hitting F4).

Note 2: You can have selected multiple files to make them all triggering a build when changed in one step.

In the “Properties” dialog under Configuration Properties –> General –> Item Type you select Custom Build Tool. Then you hit “OK”. And that’s it.

Changing the file(s) should now trigger a build when you build the solution (via menu Build –> Build Solution).

CodeProject

This week I published my first article at www.codeproject.com. (Now I’m a real programmer ) It’s about playing audio files in WPF. Go check it out here:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/audio-video/wpfaudioplayer.aspx

Today I needed to resend an email I sent a day before – using Outlook 2011 for Mac. It took a while to compose this email so I got quite scared when I looked at my “Sent Items” folder and the mail wasn’t there.

My situation: I’m using an Exchange mailbox is primary mailbox and have a POP3 account for my university email address. The latter I only use to send emails (as the actual university email address is just a forwarding). If you have a similar setup and problem, read on.

On Outlook for Windows, sending an email through this email address/account, moves the sent email to the main “Sent Items” folder – which at the same time is the “Sent Items” folder for my Exchange mailbox.

Not so on Outlook for Mac. Here we have a separate “Sent Items” folder for POP3 accounts (called “On my computer”). I had this folder disabled since (I thought) I only use my Exchange mailbox. The option hide/show this folder is in the preferences under “General”. (I only have the German version of Outlook, so screenshots are in German only; sorry for that.)

Option to show or hide the "On my computer" folder(s).

Now the “On my computer” folder showed up in my “Sent Items” folder and there my mails were.

Sent items on my computer folder

Now, the quest at hand was: How do I get my sent mails into my “Sent Items” Exchange folder. The solution: Create a rule for this.

So, I went to “Settings” –> “Rules” and created a new rule in the “Outgoing” rules section.

Creating a local rule

Here you create a rule with:

• Condition: Account is YourPop3Account

• Execute: Move message to “Sent Items (Exchange)”

Leave the rest as it is and hit “OK”. Now try to send an email from your POP3 account and, voilà, the email you just sent should appear in your Exchange’s “Sent Items” folder.

(via xkcd)

Today I tried the software I’ve been writing on another computer – and it immediately crashed. I got this error message:

Unhandled Exception: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly ‘TrackerInterface-Mixed-Full.dll’ or one of its dependencies. The specified module could not be found.

Here, it tells me that my DLL “TrackerInterface-Mixed-Full.dll” could not be loaded. The first thing I thought was that the application couldn’t locate this DLL – because of the FileNotFoundException. Unfortunately this wasn’t the problem.

So I figured “or one of its dependencies” was the real problem. However, the error message doesn’t tell you what dependency (DLL) is actually missing – even when debugging.

So, I did some searching and found the Assembly Binding Log Viewer (or “Fusion Log Viewer”) which comes with Visual Studio. Unfortunately it didn’t do what I needed. It seems that this is actually more for .NET assemblies rather than native DLLs. (You need to run it with Adminstrator rights; otherwise it won’t work. Just in case you’ll ever need it.)

After some more searching I found a tool called Dependency Walker. And that’s exactly what did the trick. So I opened “TrackerInterface-Mixed-Full.dll” with it and got the following result:

Here you have my “TrackerInterface-Mixed-Full.dll” at the top of the tree and its dependencies listed below it. For one, you can see immediately that the file “QTCORED4.DLL” is missing. But you can also see that one dependency (“MAPPARSERD1.DLL”) is missing some dependencies as well. (Fortunately, Dependency Walker automatically expands all dependencies that again have missing dependencies.)

I hope this helps in case you’re running into this problem yourself.

Note: The part “The specified module could not be found.” of the error message indicates some missing DLLs. There can be other reasons for getting a “Could not load file or assembly ‘Assembly.dll’ or one of its dependencies.” which then have other texts after this one.

Note 2: This only seems to happen when using native DLLs from .NET applications/assemblies.