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Showing posts from June, 2013

Switch Xamarin Studio to Xcode5 for iOS 7.0 Development (and back)

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I enjoy using Xamarin .  I also want to play with the Xcode5 Developer Preview . But sometimes I want to switch back & forth between Xcode5 and Xcode4.  Why?  Because of this: That's the message you'll get in Xamarin if you use Xcode5-DP.  So I hacked out a quick Python script to help me switch back & forth in my project. It's simple enough to just be worthy of a Gist.  See: xamarin_switch.py at https://gist.github.com/xeb/5890019 . Use it within the directory of the solution & csproj that you are working with.  Then just run the script & specify which verison of Xcode you want.  (Either a 4 or a 5 or "xcode4" or "xcode5"). Example: Again thats.... xamarin_switch.py xcode4 To go to Xcode4 + iOS 5.1/6.0/etc. and xamarin_switch.py xcode5 To go to Xcode5-DP + iOS 7.0 This did three things: Changed the SDK Location of Xamarin Studio Changed the first CSPROJ file to the correct iOS Build version Launched Xamar

Unconventional Technical Leadership

I just finished reading David Byttow's Effective Technical Leadership post.  There are some unsaid ideas that he did not present that I wanted to share.  But first... Why listen to me?  I'm a Lead Software Engineer at a large video game developer ( google me ).  I've stopped posting to this blog since joining the company as a Software Engineer in 2010.  But in 2 years, I've been promoted 3 times and now lead a team that develops a massive amount of live operation.  I will get called at 3am if something breaks.  Or is too slow.  There is no one above me that has more technical knowledge of the systems I work on.  Once its escalated to me -- I have to fix it.  If something happens 1-in-a-million times in our codebase, it may happen 100 times a day. It is not easy  keeping people productive, effective & reliable in a medium sized team.  Below are some random bits of advice I can offer after spending a decade creating large scale systems and leading a wide variet