Posts Tagged ‘troubleshooting’

Getting the Android Emulators to work in Windows, Visual Studio, and Xamarin

Posted: December 2, 2017 in Development, Intel, Microsoft, Mobile, Operating Systems, Programming, Software Development, tablet, teaching, tip, Windows, Xamarin
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As part of my .NET 301 Advanced class at the fantastic Eleven Fifty Academy, I teach Xamarin development. It’s sometimes tough, as every student has a different machine. Some have PCs, others have Macs running Parallels or Bootcamp. Some – many – have Intel processors, while others have AMD. I try to recommend students come to the class with Intel processors, due to the accelerated Android emulator benefit Intel’s HAXM – Hardware Acceleration Manager – provides. This blog entry is a running list of how I’ve solved getting the emulator running on so many machines. I hope the list helps you, too.

This list will be updated from time to time, as I find new bypasses. At this time, the list is targeted primarily for machines with an Intel processor. Those with AMD and Windows are likely stuck with the ARM emulators. Umm, sorry. I welcome solutions, there, too, please!

Last updated: December 4, 2017

Make sure you’re building from a path that’s ultimate length is less than 248 characters.

That odd Windows problem of long file paths bites us again here. Many new developers tend to build under c:\users\username\documents\Visual Studio 2017\projectname. Add to that the name of the project, and all its subfolders, and the eventual DLLs and executable are out of reach of various processes.

I suggest in this case you have a folder such as c:\dev\ and build your projects under there. That’s solved many launch and compile issues.

Use the x86 emulators.

If you have an Intel processor, then use the x86 and x64 based emulators instead of ARM. They’re considerably faster, as long as you have a) an Intel processor with virtualization abilities, which I believe all or most modern Intel processors do, and b) Intel’s HAXM installed.

Make sure VTI-X / Hardware Virtualization is enabled.

Intel’s HAXM – which you can download here – won’t run if the processor’s virtualization is disabled. You need to tackle this in the BIOS. That varies per machine. Many devices seem to chip with the feature disabled. Enabling it will enable HAXM to work.

Uninstall the Mobile Development with .NET Workload using the Visual Studio Installer, and reinstall.

Yes, I’m suggesting Uninstall + Reinstall. This has worked well in the class. Go to Start, then Visual Studio Installer, and uncheck the box. Restart afterwards. Then reinstall, and restart.

Mobile Development Workload Screenshot

Use the Xamarin Android SDK Manager.

The Xamarin team has built a much better Android SDK Manager than Google’s. It’s easy to install HAXM, update Build Tools and Platforms, and so forth. Use it instead and dealing with tool version conflicts may be a thing of the past.

Make sure you’re using the latest version of Visual Studio.

Bugs are fixed all the time, especially with Xamarin. Make sure you’re running the latest bits and your problems may be solved.

Experiment with Hyper-V Enabled and Disabled.

I’ve generally had issues with virtualization when Hyper-V is enabled. If you’re having trouble with it enabled, try with it disabled.

To enable/disable Hyper-V, go to Start, then type Windows Features. Choose Turn Windows Features On or Off. When the selection list comes up, toggle the Hyper-V feature accordingly.

Note: You may need to disable Windows Device Guard before you can disable Hyper-V. Thanks to Matt Soucoup for this tip.

Use a real device.

As a mobile developer, you should never trust the emulators to reflect the real thing. If you can’t get the emulators to work, and even if you can, you have the option of picking up an Android phone or tablet for cheap. Get one and test with it. If you’re not clear on how to set up Developer Mode on Android devices, it’s pretty simple. Check out Google’s article on the subject.

Try Xamarin’s HAXM and emulator troubleshooting guide.

The Xamarin folks have a guide, too.

If all else fails, use the ARM processors.

This is your last resort. If you don’t have an Intel processor, or a real device available, use the ARM processors. They’re insanely slow. I’ve heard there’s an x86 emulator from AMD, yet it’s supposedly only available for Linux. Not sure why that decision was made, but moving on… 🙂

Have another solution?

Have a suggestion, solution, or feature I’ve left out? Let me know and I’ll update!

 

Having trouble connecting to named SQL Server instances in Jira? This may help…

Posted: September 26, 2015 in hosting, Microsoft, SQL Server, support
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I was recently having trouble telling Jira to connect to a named SQL Server instance. Using Jira’s configuration manager, I should be able to use the SERVERNAME\INSTANCENAME syntax like every other modern application. Well, not with Jira. I found the solution and here ya go:

In the database field in the configuration manager, which you can launch from bin\config.bat in the Atlassian Jira Program Files folder, type

SERVERNAME;instance=INSTANCENAME

Oh, did Atlassian forget to tell you to install Java Runtime Edition on your server? Of course they did… Go ahead and install it if you haven’t, but make sure you pay very close attention and don’t click I Agree to install Yahoo and junkware on your machine. Because, well, Oracle.

This information was lovingly sourced from the comments on: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/connecting-to-named-instances-in-sql-server-173435.html

Enjoy!

Custom DLLs not loading in Azure? Might be a PATH issue… Here’s a fix.

Posted: September 25, 2015 in Azure, Microsoft, Programming, Software Development
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I recently ran into a need to use the LAME MP3 encoder in a customer’s website. Problem was, once I deployed to Azure, I received an error of “Unable to load DLL libmp3lame.32.dll”. Uh oh! “But it’s in the bin folder!” I screamed silently at Starbucks. So, I binged the issue and found a good answer on StackOverflow. I’m sharing here because it helped unstick me, and I imagine others may be running to this issue with libraries other than LAME.

I ended up adding the function to my Global.asax, in addition to importing namespaces System.IO and System.Linq:

/// <summary>
/// Updates PATH variable in hosting instance to allow referring to items in this project's /bin folder.
/// Very helpful with Azure.
/// </summary>
public static void CheckAddBinPath()
{
    // find path to 'bin' folder
    var binPath = Path.Combine(new string[] { AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "bin" });
    // get current search path from environment
    var path = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("PATH") ?? "";
 
    // add 'bin' folder to search path if not already present
    if (!path.Split(Path.PathSeparator).Contains(binPath, StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase))
    {
        path = string.Join(Path.PathSeparator.ToString(), new string[] { path, binPath });
        Environment.SetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", path);
    }
}

Then in Application start I simply added:

// Sometimes files aren't loaded properly from bin. Hint to the app to load from /bin, too.
CheckAddBinPath();

I hope that helps!