Management Tool For Windows Service

Background
I've created a Windows service that exposes a TCP socket to wireless clients that access it over (right now) WiFi, Edge, and 3G connections. The basic purpose of the service is to collect a user identifier from the client, process certain validations against it, and return the result back to the wireless client. The requirement is that appear to be instantaneous to the end user. That goal has been accomplished. On average, the round trip is under half a second. That appears immediate enough to the end user. There are occasional lags and timeouts, but there's nothing that can be done about that due to the fact that the wireless networks have their own stability issues. If the connection drops, too bad. Some devices hold a backup database which allows a fail over in the event of a server timeout, and this helps to hide the occasional server issue. A client side backup is not an option on all devices.
Problem
The data that the server uses to validate client requests is stored in a cache that lives in the memory space of the Windows service, so there's no easy way to see if the cache is being updated, completely built, missing items, or to look at the state of specific items. There is logging on the server, but there has to be the balance of logging issues and providing diagnostic information that can give details of the current state of the server.
Solution
We could go log file crazy, writing a bunch of various logs that serve different purposes, but that would very quickly get messy. The code would be more complex than necessary, provide additional overhead to the service, and create more potential points of failure in the service. A better option is to create a simple UI client application that the customer can use to ask the service for its current state, so that's what I'm doing.
I've created a WCF service endpoint using named pipes in the Windows service. This service end point exposes a handful of useful methods for gathering information, and running simple tasks against, the cache and processing stored in the Windows service. The UI client can then call methods exposed on the WCF service, and provide data that the customer would like to review. Extending the functionality of the WCF service is simple enough, although it does require a redeployment of the Windows service, and that is not always convenient in a production server.

Forcing Blackberry socket timeout

Maybe if I talk it through I can come up with a better solution because I don't like what I'm doing, but right now, I have nothing better.

Here's the situation.
I've written an application for a Blackberry. This application requires a socket connection to communicate with a remote resource. It works fine, but once in a while I'm told that the application fails to contact the remote server. It throws a connection timeout error, and I'm told that it takes 15 seconds for this to occur. This is not acceptable to the client, and they are requiring that I drive the timeout down to 3 seconds. My research has shown that there is a connection object that will allow me to set a connection timeout, but in order to use this object I have to utilize the BES server. This is not an option, so as far as I can tell, I'm stuck not being able to set a timeout on the connection.

Here's my solution.
I've created a thread object that wraps the process of connecting, sets any exceptions, and sets a boolean variable indicating that the connection attempt is complete. If there's no exception I can assume that a complete connection attempt was successful, and go about my business.
I start the thread.
I then go in to a loop that will loop for 3 seconds or until my boolean variable indicates that my connection is complete. In the loop I sleep for a little bit, and then check again.
I'm not happy with this solution. It feels like there's too much going on with this solution, but I'm just not really sure what else I can do to force the socket to not try to connect for more than 3 seconds.

// something like this.
private static void openConnection(final String url) throws Exception
{
    boolean connecting = true;
    Exception exception = null;

    new Thread()
    {
        public void run()
        {
            try
            {
                _connection = (StreamConnection)Connector.open(url);
            }
            catch(Exception e)
            {
                 _exception = e;
            }
            finally
            {
                 connecting = false;
            }
        }
    }.run();
    long timeout = getTime() + _threadTimeout; // 3000 ms added to the current time
    while(connecting || getTime() < timeout)
    {
        Thread.sleep(50);
    }
    if(null != exception)
    {
        throw exception;
    }
}

Complex objects with Ksoap2

My brain is fried, I won't even try to post sample code. You can find it HERE
He has supplied a very straightforward tutorial, that is clear, easy to follow, and very understandable. Good job! One major problem, though, I had a problem similar to many others. Although I could send an object to my .net web service and call my web method, when my object arrived at the web service destination it was null. I've spent the last several hours fighting with this, and I've had zero luck until it struck me.
Android code snippet:

MyComplexObject myObject = new MyComplexObject();
PropertyInfo propertyInfo = new PropertyInfo();
propertyInfo.setName("myObject");
propertyInfo.setValue(myObject);

.Net code:
[WebMethod]
public bool MyMethod(MyComplexObject entity)
{
}

Are you seeing the problem? Neither did I, because parameter names aren't supposed to matter, it's the underlying type that matters. I'll spell it out. In my java code I called my object "myObject" in my .net code I called my parameter "entity." As soon as I changed my parameter names so that both in the java code and the .Net code my instance/parameter was named "entity" I suddenly got my object deserializing in my web server! I don't know if this will solve your problem or not. KSoap2 seems to be a beast, and frankly if I can make it work, that will be enough for me without having to understand it for a while, but give it a shot. You may find that you get some nice .Net web service love.
Now, off to find out why I'm getting an org.ksoap2.serialization.SoapPrimitive exception when I get my response back from the server.
Good luck!

The app is complete...or is it?

So, I've finished my first app. Actually, it was a few weeks ago. I had it up on the web for anyone who happened to stumble by to download and install. I have my little ads in there, and it all seems to work. I let it bake on a couple of phones with a little testing. I saw one crash, which actually had to do with memory issues on one of the phones, life was good. I then built and signed my release .apk, and put that version up. I verified that I had the signing right, and the app still worked. I let it bake a little longer, did some more testing, and life was still good. It was time to take the big step, give The Google my $25, and become an official android developer so I could upload. Life was good.

I went in to try to upload, and I get a message telling me that the attribute android:name is not a string value. I've been fighting with this in my free time for about a week now, and so far, no love. Don't bother telling me that there's something wrong with my AndroidManifest.xml. I will respond with a "no shit, I've already figured out that is probably the case!" and then I may throw things at you. I'm still going over my files, and reaching out trying to get help with this. Rest assured that I will post when I find out what is actually wrong with my app.


UPDATE
After fighting with this I realized an additional issue. My app wouldn't run on anything above android ver 1.6. In spite of the extremely useful "Maybe there's something wrong with your androidManifest.xml file" answers...(roughly 1 millisecond of googling confirmed that for me, thank you very much, you mental giants)...I got fed up, and decided to rewrite the app from the ground up. Literally, line by line, from the ground up. I tested along the way, and had no issues, right up until putting in the elements to an in my androidManifest.xml, and there was the issue. The name attribute on my tag was a string resource. Doesn't sound like an issue to me, and in fact the google docs say to use a string resource. I was set up correctly, but it didn't work. I hard coded the value of the name attribute, and the problem vanished. That's it. The end.
I don't know why, but it didn't like using a string resource in the name attribute value.