Updating an end of life application

A while ago I posted that the FillLPG for Android application was, in a word, Dead! But in few days time users will notice a new version, 2.0.28.5, hitting the Play Store as well as in-app notifications to update – so what gives?

Have I changed my mind about withdrawing support for this app – no, I haven’t. Essentially my hand has been forced by Google’s recent decision to deprecate some of the functionality I was using to fetch nearby places as part of the ‘Add New Station’ wizard as well as requiring 64 bit support – the latter being little more than a checkbox and nothing that most users will ever notice.

Getting to grips with OzCode

When I was at NDC London in January I watched a demonstration of the OzCode extension for Visual Studio. Not only was it well presented but it highlighted some of the pinch points we all have to tolerate while debugging.

In return for a scan of my conference pass, i.e. my contact details, I received a whopping 35% discount off a licence and without completing the 30 day trial I was so impressed that I pulled out my wallet (actually the company wallet!).

Hey Dude – where’s my online tool?

Over the past 18 months I’ve been posting details of various online tools that I’ve encountered – but not this month I’m afraid.

Why? Well, frankly I’ve run out! I’ve got nothing!

I’ve been hard at work but haven’t actually found the need for an online tool that I haven’t used before.

Now that’s not to say that there aren’t any tools out there – it’s just that I didn’t need them, not this month anyway. Next month may be different but I think it’s probably best to drop the ‘of the month’ banner and just categorise them as ‘Online Tool’

NDC London – A Little Review

So, the last developers conference (if you could call it that) I went to was way back in 2001 when we had WAP phones and if you had a Pentium 4 computer you were some super-techno hacker.

Well, time have changed somewhat, we now have smart phones with more memory than we had hard drive space back then and I’m writing this post on a workstation with 8 cores and 32GB RAM (and this isn’t even the cutting edge). Add to that the cloud, driverless cars and social networks with billions of users (for better or worse) and we have come a hell of a long way.

Well, I decided to bite the bullet and shell out for a super early-bird ticket and get myself up to London for a few days to Geek-Out.

Online Tool of the Month – converter.telerik.com

Telerik shouldn’t be a new name to you but if it is then I suggest you head on over to their main site, https://www.telerik.com/, and have a look.

This post relates to there Code Converter utility which I found a need for recently while maintaining a clients VB.NET application.

Although I used to develop mainly in VB.NET I am now predominantly working in C# and as anyone who has used both languages will tell you, flipping between one and the other is not exactly painless.

On this particular occasion I had an idea how I could fix the issue with the clients application code – but my idea was in C# – enter the Telerik Code Convertor.