Bye, bye Resharper

The last function I missed in Visual Studio, that was keeping Resharper on, was locating a file by name or by class name.



However, it turns out that the feature already exists, as explained here:

https://visualstudioextensions.vlasovstudio.com/2017/06/14/new-code-navigation-shortcuts-in-visual-studio-2017/

It is called 'Go to All' and is easy to assign to the familiar Ctrl+T shortcut.



Good bye, slowness.

Background services changes in Android 8

Some material to study in order to upgrade some old code:

• https://android.jlelse.eu/keep-those-background-services-working-when-targeting-android-oreo-sdk-26-cbf6cc2bdb7f
• http://www.techeos.com/posts/android-jobintentservice-oreo.html
• https://medium.com/til-kotlin/jobintentservice-for-background-processing-on-android-o-39535460e060
• https://medium.com/google-developers/scheduling-jobs-like-a-pro-with-jobscheduler-286ef8510129

In addition, notification channels need to be created for any notifications on API >= 26. Notification channels are useful. They allow grouping of notifications so that end users can disable or enable them as they see fit.

• https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/android-o-how-to-use-notification-channels--cms-28616 

NextCloud on Raspberry Pi

Considering the new Raspberry Pi has mobile and Wi-Fi interfaces built-in, it makes a fantastic candidate for being a home access point as well as a NextCloud server.



Now there is also an official project, a Raspberry Pi image of the latest stable NextCloud release:

https://ownyourbits.com/2017/02/13/nextcloud-ready-raspberry-pi-image/



A wonderful candidate for the next winter hobby project.

Use your SD card as Internal Storage on a Samsung phone

It requires some tinkling because Samsung disabled this native Android functionality (wtf?!).

In any case, the method works and my phone can breathe again.

Instructions

Edit, 2018-03-19: Now the phone provides the option to add an SD card as an internal storage. However, be careful to perform the data migration after formatting the card. This will move the data and make pointers for the data folders. Otherwise, you may end up with the card formatted but not being used by the system as the data folders still point to the phone's memory card.

Desktop software repository

My new software repository for PC desktop software is FossHub - https://www.fosshub.com/.

NextCloud: Open Source Personal Information Management

I've just revisited OwnCloud suite and found that a decent progress has been made to warrant a viable alternative to Google suite of PIM applications. Here is a quick rundown:

• Calendar -> NextCloud Calendar online, Mozilla Thunderbird on PC
• Contacts -> NextCloud Contacts online, Mozilla Thunderbird + CardBook on PC
• Sync adapter for Android = DAVdroid
• Tasks => OpenTasks or aCalendar+
• Notes => NextCloud Notes (link) for Android

There is a number of providers offering free OwnCloud/NextCloud hosting. Even the minimal options with 500MB or 1GB should be free to host important files and PIM data (calendar, contacts).

NextCloud applications allow downloading calendars as .ics and contacts as .vcf files, which can be used for ocassional backup. If a server goes down, you always have the backup available on your device where the data was last edited.

The next step might be to run own NextCloud instance on Raspberry Pi or something similar.

Desktop multiplatform GUI options

Thinking of creating a desktop application nowadays is really a pain. Multiple platforms and no definitive way to share the UI although no major functionality changes have been introduced in a long time.

Some options, for .NET framework, are listed at GUI Toolkits page at Mono Project web site. One interesting framework is GTK#, which uses the very-popular GTK UI framework.

While .NET has been introduced onto multiple platforms, it will be interesting to see if GTK# works equally well for a multi-platform UI.