Useful stuff to help with Xamarin Android Bindings

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At YARG, we have successfully created Xamarin bindings to Good Technology's iOS Good Dynamics SDK and we've now got a few iOS Enterprise Apps out there in the field.  We're now in the process of creating the Android binding set, we're not far off but we still have a few interfaces / classes that we need to expose.  As a point of reference on some of the toolsets we're using I thought I'd jot them down here.

When you're binding against a .jar file it's very handy to traverse the package to see what classes, types etc are exposed.

To do this, you have a few options (of course there are more but these work for us and they're free)

Extracting the Contents of a JAR File which is the standard command line operation on a Mac OSX

On Windows development boxes we use this excellent free tool
JD-GUI is a standalone graphical utility that displays Java source codes of “.class” files

When you are trying to create your Xamarin Android bindings you may run across an error where it complains that you are not implementing IntPtr Handle and Dispose.  To get round this problem I found this link:

http://blog.ostebaronen.dk/2013/09/how-to-implement-intptr-handle-and.html

I hope some of this helps!


Comments

  1. Anonymous11 September 2014 at 17:41

    Hey there! would you advise Xamarin for a company that uses Good Technologies for all its mobile communication? or is the support/product not yet there?

    thanks!
    Tom

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steve Gray24 September 2014 at 01:41

    Hi Tom, sorry I've only just seen this comment. To use the Good Dynamics SDK you have to create Xamarin bindings to talk to the native code. It's not supported by Good yet but I think the wheels are in motion to hopefully change this. The bindings we have created seem stable and the have been used to create a number of Android and iOS Enterprise Apps. I hope this helps!

    ReplyDelete

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