My Development Computer 2017

Here are the essential tools I put in my seven years old personal laptop for my application development during evening and weekend as of July 2017. Most of them are open source and free. My other development machine at work is much better and powerful than this (Intel i7 CPU and 16GB RAM).

1. Mozilla Firefox
2. Google Chrome
3. Notepad++ is a free  source code text editor.
4. WinMerge for compare and merge files.
5. 7-Zip (Compress and decompress files)
6. KeePass the free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager. I don't need to remember password for each web sites or applications.
7. Python 3.6  This programming language is powerful and fast. According to TIOBE Index for July 2017, Python is one of top five popular programming languages. 
8. LibreOffice is a powerful free, open source and cross platform office suite. I used it on other PC Windows, my MacBook Pro, and Ubuntu Linux.
9. SQL Server 2016 SP1 Developer Edition SQL Server Developer Edition is a free download for Visual Studio Dev Essentials members and for development and testing only, and not for production environments or for use with production data per Microsoft SQL Server blog
10. Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2017 (Free version for an individual developer or small business, not for corporate)
11. Microsoft Visual Studio Code. This is free, open source, and runs everywhere. It loaded faster than Visual Studio.
12. Git for Windows. It's a free and open source distributed version control system.
13. Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine.
14. VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
15. Greenshot is the most awesome tool for making screenshots you can get on your Windows PC. It's is better than built-in application Snipping Tools. I can blackout or obscure portion of screen easily.
16. FileZilla® Open source FTP software.

In addition to C# and Microsoft SQL Server, I will spend my spare time to work on Python and Node.js.

My experience with Android Studio

I love to learn or try a new thing everyday. Yesterday, I downloaded Android Studio and installed on both Mac OS/X Lion 10.7  and Ubuntu 13.04 laptop. Here is the screenshot of Android Studio my MacBook Pro.

I'm still figuring out how to fix this error: "emulator: ERROR: unknown skin name 'WXGA720'" when  attempt to load Android Virtual Device without using Eclipse Juno to launch the AVD first.

For Ubuntu 13.04, I must using Oracle Java Development Kit instead of OpenJDK to run Android Studio. With Eclipse IDE, I can use OpenJDK. Here is the screenshot when I make a new Android project imported from my GitHub account:

I also trying to install Android Studio on Microsoft Windows. To save time, you need to read carefully the note on http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html

Since this is a preview release, I don't expect much. I hope Google will make Android Studio tool better.

Back to Android

After  more than six months away from Android programming, I'm back. During the past few months, I put my personal project: Develop an Android application, on hold in order to take care other high priority projects at work and family matters.

One of my resolution last year was develop a mobile application. It will be a show case of my skills. I'm moving from web applications to mobile applications. I spent a lot of time to read whatever related to Android programming. Reading is not enough. I need to practice and do a real work in order to master in something. Get your feet wet. Get hand-on experience. So, while I'm waiting for my car at dealer, I open my laptop, launch the Eclipse IDE and start programming. I switch back and forth between the Eclipse IDE and Google Chrome browser. Each time, I'm stuck with the code, I search for solution on the web. Developer.Android.com is a huge resource for Android programming.

I hope I will have my app ready to release to Android Marketplace in next few months. Yes, I'm hope. :)

Windows Phone 7

Take a day off to attend Microsoft Windows Phone 7 (WP7) Unleashed workshop. This is a hand on work shop, no marketing stuffs. Although I'm working on Android and gradually moving toward the Open Source and Linux, I love to keep up my current skills in Microsoft Windows technology.

Prior to the workshop, I needed to download and installed Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta. Honest to say, WP7 is much better than previous version Windows Mobile. The tool used to develop for Windows Phone is much easier than the tool used to develop Android. For Android, I must downloaded and installed Java SDK, Android SDK, Eclipse JSEE separately. Manually configured Android Virtual Device (AVD). However, for Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools, it just one click. Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone is much better than Eclipse.

There were four sessions for this work shop. When I worked on the first lab, Windows Phone Emulator could not load on virtual machine running Windows Vista. Thus, I must switched back to my Windows 7 partition. Moved on to lab number two, the Click event handler for the Search button did not work. Hmmm, I followed step by step as in lab document. I also had a chance to take a look on Windows Phone 7 handset. The LG Windows Phone 7 was bigger and thicker than my LG Android. The speakers provided useful information regarding to WP7.

I don't know WP7 is success in the future or not. At least right now, it has my attention. It's competitive with Android and iPhone.