Monthly Archives: September 2006

RSS Reader for BlackBerry

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RSS Reader MIDlet on BlackBerry Pearl (Emulator)There were some anonymous requests for releasing a BlackBerry version of the RSS Reader MIDlet so I took the challenge and was able to build a version for BlackBerry. The application seems to work with the BlackBerry emulator and according to the anonymous comment it installs over the air on the actual device. Here are links for the BlackBerry files:

www.substanceofcode.com/downloads/midlets/rim/RSSReader.jad
www.substanceofcode.com/downloads/midlets/rim/RSSReader.cod

If you have the actual device please leave some comments how it works on the device in real life. We don’t have any BlackBerrys here in Finland and I think that these devices are quite rare in the whole Europe. The BlackBerry Pearl seems to be quite an interesting device after using the emulator and reading specification’s from the home page.

How did I build BlackBerry versions? I downloaded BlackBerry JDE 4.2 from BlackBerry Developer site and followed the instructions that I found from NetBeans knowledgebase. In the end it was quite easy.Сувенири

OPML support for RSS Reader

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rss-reader-import1.pngI added OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) support for RSS Reader MIDlet. User can now import list of RSS feeds from simple text file or OPML file.

User can import list of feeds by selecting “Import Feeds” command from main menu. Next user needs to enter the URL address for the text file or OPML file. File format should be selected appropriately. New feeds are imported to the bookmarks list when OK command is selected.

Line-by-line format should include URL to the RSS feed and optionally a bookmark’s title per each row. Here are sample files from both formats:

The new version (v1.2) can be downloaded from here. Download includes source code along with NetBeans project files. Source code is also hosted at Google Code. The project’s home page is at http://code.google.com/p/mobile-rss-reader/.

Test-Driven Development

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nunit.pngI have been moving towards using the Test-Driven Development (TDD) more and more both as professionally and in my hobby projects. Even the slightest use of TDD have shown to give a good results. As the basic rule of software development says: “It is always better to identify bugs as early as possible in development phase”.

Only problem when applying the TDD is the habit to start coding the actual code before making the test cases. It is somewhat hard to change your habits as you have used to do it in one way for multiple years. This is something that should be noticed in educational plans. Maybe schools and universities could squeeze some unit tests even for the first “hello world” application so that the programmers could adapt to the TDD style of thinking as early as possible.
Here are some TDD related links:

Microsoft Web Day 2006, Helsinki

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Web Day 2006 at HelsinkiLast Thursday, 23th of August, I visited the Microsoft’s Web Day 2006 event at Helsinki, Kinopalatsi. Microsoft and their partners gave good presentations about various new web technologies like Atlas, which is Microsoft’s AJAX library for ASP.NET. There were also cool presentations about the Vista’s gadgets and Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF.

I especially liked the key speaker Dave Sussman‘s presentation. He spoke about the Atlas, Entity Mapping and LINQ language. Really looking forward on those technologies.