Debugging in Visual Studio and Eclipse, Hotkey Consistency

Most developers become accustom to hotkeys and shortcut key strokes.  I, for one, cannot live without them, but there is one thing that drives me crazy and that’s debugging with different key bindings between Visual Studio and Eclipse.  I’ll have to admit, that I should probably keeps with the Eclipse key bindings when it comes to debugging, but I’ve grown custom to Visual Studios F5, F10, F11.  To make my life a pleasant one, I like to modify Eclipse’s key binding when it comes to debugging.  Follow the step below to achieve just this.

1.  Open Eclipse and go to Window^Preferences.  Select the section General->Keys.  I like to sort the items by Binding so that the ones to modify are all clumped together.

2.  Modify the following items show in the diagram below.  Unbind the Refresh for “When=In Windows”, otherwise two operations will be bound to F5.

 

If you want to go the other way around and modify Visual Studio, then open Visual Studio and navigate to Tools^Options.  Select section Environment->Keyboard.

Setup Eclipse for Android Programming

This is a fairly simple process but there are always a few things I forget.  Once you have your Eclipse setup with Android development, you can Import some of there example projects and run them right way (point to you Android SDK folder and Import project process will find the available projects).

1.  Install a fresh copy of Eclipse just for Android programming.  I like to keep my Android development separate from other development using Eclipse, like Java, etc.  Follow my blog here on configuring Eclipse, I use the path c:\Tools\android-eclipse-XXX.

2.  Install the Android SDK.  I like to install in in my c:\SDKS folder.

3.  With Eclipse open, go to menu Windows^Preferences.  The preferences dialog will open.  Click the Android node.  You should see an input for SDK Location.  Pick the folder where the SDK was installed.  For me it was c:\SDKS\android-sdk.  Click the Apply button, then OK for the Preferences dialog.

Android Layout Stops Working in Eclipse

So far most of the Android development in Eclipse has been smooth sailing.  There is one issue I’ve come across over and over, I get the error message "No XML content. Please add a root view or layout to your document."  A few times I was able to fiddle with the layout and it would just start working.  This last ADK update, I had enough so I went searching again.  This time I found an answer to my prayers.  It turns out that if you have any custom device configuration in the layout editor that do not contain the proper qualifiers, you will get this issue, see thread here.

Solution

Add all applicable qualifiers.

1.  Open screen editor list.

2.  Open your custom screen, then move the necessary qualifiers over.

Inkscape, A Cool Vector Graphics Tool!

I won’t be the first to admit that I stink when it comes to my graphic design skills, but I do know how to solve problems when presented with one.  I had a major problem that was racking my nerves, icons for a web site and phone app I was developing.  Knowing the result I wanted, I soon employed the help of Google.  Low and behold I can across Inkscape, an awesome scalable vector graphics program and it was free!  Armed with this new tool I still had one issue, how the heck am I going to use this thing (that would be my lack of design knowledge bubbling up).  No worries, I wasn’t out yet.  After searching a little bit for some of the results I was looking for, I came across this blog, screencasters.heathenx.org (my hats off to you).  In no time, i was able to accomplish buttons, special affects, paper folds, etc.

Install on Windows

1.  Install GIMP.

2.  Download Inkscape and install for windows.