Getting Started with Angular

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This short blog post is expected to serve as a quick reference to tiptoe into the murky waters of angular. The coolest thing about this is that we'll be using the command prompt quite a bit...nothing like a little retro-feel to things. One clarification before everything else is that this is ANGULAR and NOT ANGULAR JS. The difference between the two is well documented and beyond the scope of this humble post - just keep in mind that Angular is the newer type-script based thingy ... Angular JS is a little old and is probably destined to the same fate as DVD's DVD Players, CD's etc.. Now that we've cleared the air the first thing of course is to download Node. It's a pretty straightforward thing. Head on to https://nodejs.org and download the latest version for Windows. (Or whatever your OS is) I'm using Windows 10.

After the executable is downloaded just let it run - don't change any of the defaults. Soon node is installed.  The next step is to make sure it's properly installed. For that the old command prompt needs to be fired up.
The next command is pretty straightforward typing in node --version (make sure there's a space)  shows the node version and in turn verifying that we do have node running on our computer.

Now that node is properly installed and hopefully up and running - the next requirement is to install the Angular CLI

in the same prompt type npm install -g @angular/cli 

npm here stands for node package manager. the -g option is important as it means that the installation is global , as in not restricted to a specific folder that we are in.                                          

This process will take a little bit of time.  The console will keep displaying what's going on etc. Eventually the installation finishes and we will be notified.   

The next step is to verify if angular was properly installed  for this we simply need to check the version of angular and just as it was with node  the command is ng --version   This will bring up a nice retro looking output reminiscent of the ancient days of computing. 

   This is about it - Angular is installed on your system BUT it would be nicer to see angular in action as in seeing some output. So for that we'll just make a very basic app and verify. 

CREATING  A NEW ANGULAR APPLICATION 

Still sticking to Command prompt let's move into any preferred folder to create the application. In this case I've  created a folder called 'My folder' . Inside this folder we can create an angular application with any name we like. In this case I'll just call it 'TheFirst'  the keywords of course are  ng new 

and boom your application is created. If you have something like Visual Studio Code installed it can be used to explore this project. Simply select ' Open Folder' in VS code. and select the folder you create the Angular Application. The structure can be seen in VS Code. 

One final step is to actually deploy this application. And yes we're doing that with the Command Prompt. 

Just typing ng serve  will do the trick. This should be done inside the folder that was created when creating the application. In this case it should be 'TheFirst' 

This will deploy the application on the Angular Live Development Server. Fire up the browser and type the url shown in the screen (http://localhost:4200/) 

We can now see the default Angular Page hosted - this is like every other Development Server's "Hello World" 

the port number is usually 4200 but if it is already in use a different port number can be assigned for example 4300 

and that's it! 

             

Checking Network Data Usage on Windows 10

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Recently I was curious to find out how much network data I've been using - specifically on chrome. While there is tab for that on Windows 10 Task Manager it show's only data usage by Windows 10 'Built-In' apps like Edge etc. While Edge is not a bad browser it certainly is not my daily driver. Nevertheless to check the data usage of the 'Core' windows 10 apps you just need to open the task manager and go to the App History Tab and check out the network usage.

However as you can see we don't get chrome's usage stats here.
For that we need to dig deeper into the settings  - Select 'Network and Internet'

Next up go to the data usage tab where the total usage over the last month is displayed. By clicking on 'Usage Details'  a list of ALL apps that use data can be viewed in Descending order.          

As expected Chrome uses up a whopping 6 GB in comparison to poor Edge's 40 MB 😉

         

Quadrooter: The latest android security scare

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An android security vulnerability has been causing a bit of a stir recently. Checkpoint were the first to disclose information about a potential threat affecting Qualcomm chipset based devices. (Which turns out to be quite a lot). Actually they had reported this a while back. However according to some sources Google have stated that the 'Verify Apps' feature, which has been part of Android since the early days of Jellybean is capable of identifying potential threats such as quadroot, as long as that feature is enabled.
Nevertheless here's how to check if 'Verify Apps' is 'on in your device :

'Verify apps' on a Jellybean device.

Checkpoint have also released a Quadrooter scanner which is now available on google play 

Providing the correct class and package name in an intent

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When  creating intents it should be remembered that the full qualified path to the activity class referred by the intent has to be given. This is case sensitive. Luckily when the intent is created inside an activity class, the IDE would indicate if we misspell anything.

This is all fine but a rude shock awaits if we have an intent inside xml - a layout etc.
Have a look at this case where there's an intent inside a  preference screen.

the package name is misspelled - actually it's typed Totaldemo where it should be totaldemo.
We won't get any indication until we fire up the emulator or launch the app on the device and actually tap to navigate to the desired activity.

To prevent any typos the full qualified path can be obtained like this :

this will copy the following to the clipboard 

com.apps.totaldemo

but if we select the class itself and copy the qualified name as shown below

this is copied :

/TotalDemo/src/com/apps/totaldemo/Sayit.java

Dusting off the old blog, dusting off eclipse

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It's been quite a while since I've been last here. Around the same time as my last post I started to dabble with android development - I actually made a bunch of apps for my personal use. Most of those projects stagnated due to lack of time. Recently I decided to continue/improve those projects and to post some quick tips and code snippets that would be useful and share-worthy on this blog.
All my work is on eclipse - I haven't made the leap to Android Studio yet and most of the code snippets/screen grabs are back from a couple of years, and even the new ones are on Eclipse...but what the heck I'll be posting them anyway.

Single Quotes in Oracle/ PL SQL

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SELECT 'single quotes' from dual;

output :

single quotes

SELECT '''single quotes''' from dual;

output:

'single quotes'

When using a variable :
 The following script

DECLARE

VAR_ VARCHAR2(20):='Single Quotes';

BEGIN

   dbms_output.put_line(''''||VAR_||'''');

END;

will produce this output :
'Single Quotes'

Creating an auto-complete box C#

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Create a Standard C# Form and add a combo box.

The following method initializes the combo box with the auto-complete functionality.

public void init_box()

{

AutoCompleteStringCollection ax = new AutoCompleteStringCollection();

if (File.Exists("List.txt"))

{

using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader("List.txt"))

{

string line;

while ((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null)

{

ax.Add(line);

}

}

}

comboBox1.AutoCompleteCustomSource = ax;

comboBox1.AutoCompleteSource = AutoCompleteSource.CustomSource;

comboBox1.AutoCompleteMode = AutoCompleteMode.SuggestAppend;

}

next, this method is called on the mouse click event of the combo box.

private void comboBox1_MouseClick(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)

{

init_box();

}