Linking MonoTouch into Reference Assemblies

25 Oct 2012 | Xamarin.iOS Visual Studio
Jonas Follesø made a nice Visual Studio 2010 extension to allow for loading and compiling MonoTouch projects in Visual Studio. This requires us to copy over some dll files from a Mac computer to the computer running Windows. Once in a while a new version of MonoTouch is released and this process needs to be repeated. Since I am lazy I do not want to do this copy/paste work so I made a small bash script for this which copies the stuff over into a shared folder on my PC called VSMonoTouch. The folder is hard linked to the Reference Assemblies .NETFramework v1.0 folder. So the script looks as follows The script lives in the Windows shared folder, such that when ran it copies it into it. I also link the VSMonoTouch folder the Reference Assemblies like so When a new version of MonoTouch is released I simply run the script :)

Reiser4 FS update on SourceForge

16 Oct 2012 | Linux
I just read a news post on slashdot about Reiser4 FS was updated on SourceForge very recently and it seems that it is still being developed, even though Hans Reiser was convicted for murdering his wife. This news stirred up some very funny comments, which I will posts a couple off them here:

concealment wrote:
If you can find any name that's not related to murdering your wife, go for it. Bonus points if it's catchy.
Anonymous answered:
My vote for MRDRFS.
a reply from tobiasly:
REDRUMFS. As long as you don't use it for mirroring, no one will know.
A comment from serviscope_minor:
There's going to be a few off color jokes. May as well get started.
* It's a killer filesystem.
* My disk died. Was ReiserFS the murderer?
* It's more cutting edge than Reiser's knife.
Jeremiah Cornelius replied:
Kernel merge expected
in 20 years to life.
There are probably more jokes in the comments.

TeamAddins for MonoDevelop

21 Sep 2012 | MonoDevelop TFS
Just recently found out that there is an awesome plug-in for MonoDevelop, which allows for using TFS directly in MonoDevelop. Before I found this plug-in I was using Microsoft Team Explorer Everywhere (TEE), which provided a command line tool, where I could manually check out and check in files, which was quite tedious.

TeamAddins does things similarly to what TFS does in Visual Studio, where it automagically checks out files when editing them and so on.

This plug-in is really awesome if you use TFS in your development environment. To use it simply fire up MonoDevelop, open up the MonoDevelop menu and choose Add-In Manager. Choose the Gallery tab, in the drop down menu choose Manage Repositories. In the new window press Add and  fill out the URL with: http://www.teamaddins.com/monodevelop/3.0 Now refresh the repositories and a new item under Version Control called Team Foundatation Server Add-In should appear. Install this and you are ready to set up your workspace and TFS server connections.

Find more information on TeamAddins' web page.

MvvmCross: Binding Spinner in Mono for Android

28 Aug 2012 | MvvmCross Xamarin.Android
I was playing around with binding a Spinner to a ViewModel using MvvmCross on Mono for Android yesterday, and it was not described anywhere how to do that, but I found a solution in the end.

The relevant parts of my ViewModel look like this:
What I am trying to do is to bind the List of PublicSites to the spinner, and when I select one of these in the spinner it sets the SelectedSite.

The binding itself looks like this:
The two layouts simply contain a TextView each which binds the Text property to the DisplayName property in the NoiseSentinelDirectoryEntryV1 class, which holds the name of the Site, so no magic there. Here there are anyways and they should go into the Resources/Layout folder in your project: There is also a color selector used which is placed in Resources/Color:

Disable Narrator in Windows 8

27 Aug 2012 | Windows
I am using Synergy on my work setup, where the server runs on a iMac, to that iMac computer an Apple keyboard is connected. On such a keyboard the Windows button and Alt button are switched. So when using my mouse and keyboard on my Windows PC and using Visual Studio with ReSharper, trying to press Alt+Enter for some ReSharper commands, I sometimes accidentally press the Win+Enter combination instead. This opens up the Narrator in Windows 8, which is super annoying! I could not find an official way to disable this, but I found out that changing the permissions for the currently running user helped out a lot.
So here is what I did:

  • Navigate to %systemroot%\System32
  • In this folder a file called Narrator.exe is to be found
  • Right click the file and choose Properties
  • Choose the Security tab and press Advanced
  • In the top of the window press Change to change the Owner permissions
  • In the text field write your username and press OK to all the dialogs
Now you should be able to change the permissions of the file, this is where we remove all the permissions from your user and the user back to system, this way your user will not be able to start the Narrator.
  • Right click the Narrator file again and choose Properties and Security tab
  • Press Advanced
  • Now that you are the owner you can change permissions for other users. Choose your own user and press Edit
  • Remove the Read & Execute and Read permissions and press OK
  • Now press Change in the top under Owner and write system in the text field
  • Press OK to all dialogs
Now you should have removed all your permissions and changed the owner permissions the system, which means you cannot open the program anymore. When pressing the Win+Enter combination nothing should happen now. Enjoy!