Smartphone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"As the .NET Compact Framework developers work to add features, fix bugs, and refactor code, we often have to determine whether a given change could break existing customer code. The ideal is that NetCF 3.5 will run all apps that ran on NetCF 2.0 and 1.0. We run hundreds of apps and many, many tests before shipping each product to check backward compatibility. The .NET Framework (both desktop and CF) makes heavy use of internal classes to allow us the freedom to change the internals of the framework without breaking customer code. But there are still ways that customers can write apps that may break on future versions."

A must read for every .NET Framework application developer. Andrew Arnott is providing tips that will help the developers write code that will work well with the current and future versions of the .NET Compact Framework. In case you are not familiar with .NET CF, then you should check out the Getting Started guide on MSDN, and these tutorials.

"Resco, a leading provider of advanced developer controls and tools for mobile devices, today announced availability of Resco OutlookWeekCalendar .NET, the Day/Week scheduling control optimized for .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and integrated with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. ... The Resco OutlookWeekCalendar .NET control is available as the part of Resco OutlookControls .NET. The Standard Edition is priced at $199.95, the Professional Edition at $399.95, and the Enterprise Edition at $599.95. A free trial version is also available."



Did you know that Resco has products for the developer community? Products in the form of user interface controls, data manipulation controls and samples. If you are a developer you must check out the Resco developer products. You can read about Resco's developer products over here. Recently they announced the availability of Resco OutlookWeekCalendar .NET control which is part of the Resco OutlookControls .NET.

"The Microsoft� .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP2 Redistributable contains the common language runtime and class libraries built for the .NET Compact Framework. In addition to supporting version 2.0, it also supports applications developed for version 1.0 and service pack releases before version 2.0. Important: This redistributable enables running .NET Compact Framework applications on the Pocket PC, Pocket PC Phone Edition, Smartphone, and other Windows CE powered devices. To develop .NET Compact Framework applications, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SDK are required."



Microsoft has released Service Pack 2 for the .NET Compact Framework 2.0. The update features a bunch of fixes, check out the Service Pack 2 download page for more details. In case you have the .NET CF 2.0 installed on your Smartphone, then you should download this update and install it on your device. And don't forget, you can install the .NET CF on the storage card. ;-)

"This is the Smartphone version of the hard reset desktop utility I posted days back. Purpose: hard reset Smartphone using 1 button click. File is independent of Clear Storage utility which comes only to Orange handsets. A hard reset process will revert Smartphone settings back to factory default. All informations stored on the phone�s internal memory (\Storage) will be erased. To cite few examples�System settings, Inbox messages, phonebook entries, homescreens, programs installed, registry keys/ tweaks, etc. You may need to backup contacts and other important files before a doing a hard reset. A network-unlocked phone (openline) will remain network-unlocked after a hard reset. An application-unlocked phone will not retain its unlocked/ decertified state though."



Everyone dreads it, but sometimes you have no option but to do it. Yes, hard reset is a painful step that most of us are forced to perform at some point in our Windows Mobile's life. Usually it is for routine maintenance, but sometimes it is because of a weird problem. All HTC manufactured Smartphone have a utility called Clear Storage to make this task easy for us. In case your Smartphone does not have a similar utility then here is one tool for you.

"VistaDB 3 is the world's first fully managed and typesafe SQL database engine designed specifically for the Microsoft .NET Framework, Compact Framework environments, Mono and the upcoming release of Microsoft Windows Vista. This page is provided to inform developers about VistaDB 3 key features, benefits and design goals. Most of the features listed on this page are currently code complete in the recently released Community Technology Preview (CTP). ... To maximize integration into the .NET Framework, Compact Framework, 64-bit .NET Framework and Mono, VistaDB 3 has been completely redesigned and redeveloped using Visual C# to be fully managed and typesafe."



Recently we had talked about Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition, which is the light weight database solution from the Microsoft camp. In case you are exploring alternatives or are unable to find support for certain features in the Microsoft version, then check out VistaDB 3. I haven't done a comparison between the two, but VistaDB 3 seems to offer a lot of features in a small package. The major difference that I noticed is that unlike VistaDB 3, Microsoft's SQL Everywhere is free. We would like to hear your comments if you have evaluated this database engine.

There are so many programs out there for the Smartphone that I would love to test out and have not touched for the simple fact that they require .Net CF 2.0. On a clean install Microsoft's .Net Compact Framework took up nearly 9MB's of space! Now that we have the option to install the framework to our memory cards I can finally get around to playing with all those programs I have been missing out on. :)

"Red Five Labs is about to launch a first public beta of its .NET Compact Framework runtime with class libraries for Symbian OS powered mobile devices. The beta will be compatible with Microsoft's 1.0 Compact Framework for Smartphones, and will run on S60 (previously Series 60) emulators and devices."



.NET CF version 1.0 applications will soon be able to run on Symbian based phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. 8O This is great news for Windows Mobile application developers and for the enterprise mobile application developers. They will in the near future be able to write one version of their application and have it run on not only Windows Mobile devices but also Symbian devices. Some might argue that Windows Mobile will lose its unique selling proposition if the Symbian phones started supporting .NET CF; I disagree with that argument. First of all .NET CF version 1.0 is fairly limited and requires the help of the libraries from OpenNETCF.org folks to get anything done. It doesn't seem like Red Five Labs is porting anything other than .NET CF version 1.0 at this time. The second reason is that I feel that the Symbian developers might get lured on to the Windows Mobile devices once they discover the ease of development using the developer tools provided by Microsoft. Right now this announcement sounds like a step in the right direction but a lot of work needs to be done before either side can feel threatened. Share your thoughts with us and in case you are looking for more details, check out the whitepaper [PDF].

"Microsoft .NET Compact Framework version 2.0 SP1 release has been completed and is in the process of being released. This service pack was driven customer feedback including improvements in stability, adds new debugging features, extended platform support, and new developer functionality."

The .NetCF2 SP1 is now available for download from Microsoft. Among the list of new features is the ability to store the Global Assembly Cache on the storage card, Remote Performance monitor, Serializable attribute, and a rather long list of bug fixes. Unfortunately, I don't see anything about reducing the overall size of the CF. :( you can read all about it on the .NET CF team blog.

"I've been using Windows Vista Beta 2 for a few days now. Someone posted a comment on my blog asking how to build a .NET Compact Framework 1.0 application on a Vista machine. It is possible to use Visual Studio 2005 on Vista, but there are a few additional steps if you want to target .NET CF 1.0."



Did you know that .NET Framework 1.1 must be installed on the desktop that is used to develop .NET Compact Framework 1.0 based mobile applications using Visual Studio 2005? :? Since Windows Vista does not include .NET Framework 1.1, developers will run into this problem. Check out Mel Sampat's blog to resolve the problem.

"Several months back, I wrote about how to determine whether or not a device supported screen rotation. This post prompted the question of how to programmatically rotate the device..The snippets below check the device's current display orientation. If portrait (Angle0), the orientation is changed to landscape (Angle90). If the device has any orientation other than Angle0, it is changed to portrait. ... For more information on this and other cool settings provided by the Microsoft.WindowsCE.Forms namespace, check out the MSDN documentation for SystemSettings."

David Kline has posted a handy code snippet to rotate the Windows Mobile device's screen orientation. I was hoping to try it out myself but the lazy side of me overpowered me. :) I wonder if triggering this code snippet can permanently change the screen orientation for all the applications or only for the application that calls it. It looks like it will do for all applications. I want to try it so that I can rotate the screen to make my email screen more readable. ;-)

"The Microsoft� .NET Compact Framework version 2.0 SP1 beta package is the most recent update to the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework and includes everything you need to run applications on devices developed using the .NET Compact Framework."



Beta 1 for the .Net CF 2 Service Pack 1 has been released. This update contains two parts, one for the developers to update Visual Studio 2005, and the other for us to update our Windows Mobile devices with. There is a complete list of updates and bug fixes listed on the .Net Compact Framework Team Blog.

"The .NET Compact Framework represents a major step forward in providing you with the tools and platform library support for building the next generation of smart device applications. Given that smart devices are expected to proliferate broadly over the next three years, this remains a critical area of development. Key areas of improvement in the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 are enhanced abilities for building user interfaces, a new mobile database engine and associated tools for creating data-centric applications more easily and significantly improved testing and deployment capabilities. In addition there are substantial emulator improvements, new core framework enhancements, and better COM Interop support and Managed Interfaces to D3D."



Microsoft has posted a guided tour of the Visual Studio 2005 based .NET Compact Framework 2.0 development on MSDN. The guide includes a video overview of the enhanced features in .NET CF 2.0, it can be viewed over here.

"CSLMail is my pet project on which I have been working for past few years. I have recently worked towards updating, feature enhancing and bug-fixing it, resulting in v2.0. CSLMail 2.0 is a free and feature rich .NET based email component, which supports the SMTP and POP3 protocols, completing the need to design a complete email client."

Gaurav Khanna has posted the version 2.0 of the CSLMail, which the developers can use for FREE in their applications that requires to send and receive E-Mails. :-) Looking at the feature set, you can tell that the component is rich in features. So can someone please develop an E-Mail client with support for HTML based E-Mails? ;-)

"In the last few weeks I've been working on a series of posts that describes why various design decisions were made when building the .Net Compact Framework CLR. In this first post, I describe the environmental factors that have influenced the design and provide an overview of how the CLR manages memory. Subsequent posts will follow with details on the main design tenants of the JIT compiler, garbage collector, and class loader as well as information about how to analyze the memory usage of your Compact Framework application. Throughout the series I'll be noting design decisions made when building the Compact Framework's CLR that are quite different than those made when building the CLR in the full .Net Framework."

Steven Pratschner has written a comprehensive tutorial on .NET Compact Framework CLR. You can check out the three part tutorial over here:
� Part 1: Overview and Background
� Part 2: JIT Compiler Design Considerations
� Part 3: Garbage Collector Heap Management

"Learn how to use the great support of the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 for managed multithreaded applications�while avoiding much of the complexity that comes with multithreading�in this self-paced hands-on lab. You will learn how to properly create and terminate threads, how to deal with the challenges of updating user interface controls from inside worker threads, and which synchronization objects to use at different times. Upon completion of this lab, you will know how to use the multithreading capabilities of the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 to create well responsive applications targeting Windows CE 5.0 and Windows Mobile�based devices. This is a level 300 lab, and it should take you 45 minutes to complete."



Master the multithreading capabilities of the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework version 2.0 and create applications that are more responsive. In this step-by-step example a Pocket PC based application is used to demostrate the power of multithreading, but the same concepts can be applied to the Smartphone as well. :)

"Much has been written about the new technical features available in version 2 of the .Net Compact Framework. In this post, I've tried to take a "higher level" approach by describing the product in terms of the benefits it can bring to a organization. This post is targeted at those who are currently analyzing whether to upgrade from version 1 of the Compact Framework to version 2."

Steven Pratschner works in the .NET Compact Framework team at Microsoft. He has written this detailed and easy to read article for the developers on the advantages of moving to the new .NET Compact Framework 2.0. It is sad that this much improved framework is only available on the Smartphones with Windows Mobile 5.0. :-(

"The .NET Compact Framework version 2.0 offers many improvements over its predecessor, the .NET Compact Framework version 1.0. Although the improvements are widespread, they all focus on the common goals of improving developer productivity, providing greater compatibility with the full .NET Framework and increasing support for device features. This article provides a high-level summary of the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 changes and enhancements."

Jim Wilson has written a brief introduction to the new features in the .NET Compact Framework 2.0. According to the author a more complete technical article will replace this one soon. :-)

"Learn how to reuse your existing Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft .NET Framework skills to develop a line-of-business (LOB) application for a Windows Mobile�based device in this self-pace, hands-on lab. You will begin with the basics of building, deploying, and debugging a Windows Mobile application by using Visual Studio 2005. By using the .NET Compact Framework and Windows Mobile SDK, you will then be led through the steps of developing the application to effectively address LOB business needs on a mobile device. You will complete the application by using SQL Mobile to provide persistent storage and query capabilities."

Are you looking to get started in the world of Mobile development using the latest and greatest tools? If so, the latest article on MSDN is your friend. Work your way through this 56 page step by step guide and you'll be off and running in the wonderful world of Windows Mobile development. :D

"Earlier today, we shipped Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0! This is by far the best Visual Studio and .NET Framework release that we have ever done. I am very proud to be a part of the team that did a phenomenal job of delivering this fantastic product. I also want to take this opportunity to thank the community and early adopter customers for their incredible help and invaluable contributions in helping us ship the right product. Later in the day, the final bits will be up on MSDN for our MSDN subscribers around the world to get access to the product. I am looking forward to the product launch on November 7th and all the subsequent launch events around the world."



S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, is excited about the release of the RTM version of Visual Studio 2005 and the availability of the .NET Framework 2.0 for download. Visual Studio 2005 RTM can be downloaded by MSDN subscribers from here and if you want to buy this developer software, check out this site. I wish the Express edition supported mobile development. :twisted: Developers will have to buy the more expensive Standard or Professional edition package for writing Windows Mobile 5.0 based applications. Anyone can download the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 from here. And as a reminder I have included the compatibility matrix posted by Robert Levy over at Windows Mobile Team blog.

"The .NET Compact Framework Quality Assurance Team signed off on V2 yesterday. We've been working on this for a long time and I'm excited to get this thing shipped. Soon. I'd like to share some insight into what we've been doing for the last 3 years, and why. The first half of the project cycle is divided into milestones, each about 3 months long, split between a coding and a stabilization phase. Like most of the techniques used to manage multi-person software projects, the goal of milestones is to find and fix bugs early and keep the code in good health."

Mobile developers would be pleased to know that the Microsoft Quality Assurance team has blessed the .NET Compact Framework Version 2.0. Mike Zintel in his blog is talking about the QA process and towards the end has provided some interesting statistics, like this one - "Bugs opened, reviewed and fixed or closed : 11,831." I would like to remind the developers that .NET CF 2.0 will not be available for Windows Mobile 2003 Smartphones. :-( Developers will have to target the Windows Mobile 5.0 based Smartphones to take advantage of .NET CF 2.0.