First look at the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova CTP 3.1

The company that I worked for had an old cross-platform mobile app developed by an outside contractor using PhoneGap 1.0. When I was asked to look at the app a few months ago, I had great difficulty collecting large number of moving pieces: PhoneGap, Android SDK and emulator. When I saw Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (I will call it VSTAC in the remaining of this post), I decide to give it a try since it attempts to install a large number of third-party software for me.

The journey is not exactly easy, but it is certainly far easier than collecting all the pieces myself with the excellent installation document from MSDN. The result is more than pleasant. Here are some of my findings:

1) After the installation, I could not even get a hello world app to work. It turns out that I had an older version of Nods.js. VSTAC skipped node.js installation. After I uninstall the old node.js and reinstall with the one linked from the VSTAC installation page, I was able to get hello world to work.

2) I was surprise to see the Ripple emulator which I was not aware of previously. The Ripple emulator is very fast and VSTAC provides excellent debugging experience.

3) I had to clear my Apache Cordova cache a few times. This and some other useful items are documented in FAQ. Also visit known issues.

4) The application connects to an old soap web services developed with WCF. It does not support CORS. So I had to use Ripple proxy to connect to it but I kept getting 400 error. Fortunately, I was able to hack Ripple proxy to make it work.

5) I then tried to run the app in Google Android emulator. VSTAC supports this scenario as well. I had to uninstall and reinstall some Android SDK components following this and this directions. Then I had to run AVD Manager to create and start a device. Then I had to update my display driver to make sure I have compatible OpenGL ES driver installed. After that, the Google emulator ran beautifully. It was not as fast as Ripple but is acceptable.

So at the end, I want to give a big thank you to the Microsoft VSTAC team. I know this is not easy but the excellent document got me through. It certainly saved me lots of time.