Epic Saga Chapter 3: Wherein I Try to Use Eclipse and the Android Emulator to Test My Cordova App
This (shorter-then-usual) post is the third post in the series: Uploading Images from PhoneGap/Cordova to Azure Storage using Mobile Services
In the previous chapter of this saga I was sorely disappointed to discover that the FileReader method readAsArrayBuffer was not supported on Windows Phone, which effectively ended my quest to use my trusty Lumia 920 device to upload images to Azure Blob storage as a binary JPEG, which could be downloaded via URL. This won’t be a problem, I thought, although I owned neither an Android or iOS device. I was able to successfully use the Android emulator that is part of the Android SDK when I was working on push notifications to PhoneGap apps.
In an ironically timed turn of events, just that very morning the corporate IT folks had pushed down to my machine a security update to Java 1.7. While I had had no problems running both Eclipse and the Android emulator in the past, now neither would start for me. I spent an entire morning trying various combinations of Android Developer Tools, Android SDK and Java runtimes. At some point during this frustrating exercise, I recalled reading that the Multi-Device Hybrid Apps extension for Visual Studio included an Android emulator—and that it, in fact, installed the entire Android SDK. Buoyed again by hope, I began to install the new Cordova-based extension for Visual Studio. What happened then?
…stay tuned to find out in our next exciting (and much longer and more interesting) installment… Chapter 4: Wherein I Discover Ripple and the Multi-Device Hybrid Apps Extension for Visual Studio.
Cheers!