It has been very silent on DotNETForDevices for the last eight months. No blogging and no Windows Mobile related videos. Of course there is a perfect excuse. Over the last few months I have been busy with Windows Phone 7 development. Not to develop that one killer application that I am still dreaming about, but to get familiar with this new platform and to talk about it during several local and international conferences. From day one I am excited about Windows Phone 7. The platform is definitely innovative and I like the new User Interface. For application developers there are some surprises. Your applications will be managed code (C#) only, although you can chose between two entirely different application types. The development tools are for free and all tools will be installed through one single download. The tools integrate into existing Visual Studio 2010 installations or make use of a specific Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition for Windows Phone.

Instead of writing large blog entries about Windows Phone 7, I’d rather show how to develop applications for the phone. Over the upcoming weeks I will record several videos that will be published on DotNETForDevices about Windows Phone 7 development. I am not sure which format to use. The videos might be released as a series to develop an entire application from scratch (just as I did last year for Windows Mobile application development) or as a collection of How-To videos, each covering one specific (smaller or larger) Windows Phone 7 development topic. Stay tuned!

PS: The Windows Mobile Application Development Series around DVDsMobile is temporary on hold, but once I have created ‘enough’ Windows Phone 7 development videos, I will continue with DVDsMobile as well.

One of the issues you might run into if you are creating your own User Controls for a Windows Mobile application is a poor designer experience in Visual Studio 2008. This will happen if you are making use of specific Windows CE or Windows Mobile functionality that is not supported on the desktop. The reason is that Visual Studio in designer mode does not have any knowledge about the target platform, so it needs to make use of functionality that is available on the development machine, and it will target the full .NET Framework. A typical example of poor designer experience occurs if your control is P/Invoking to a native Win32 API. In Windows CE, Win32 APIs usually live in different DLLs then their desktop counter parts. Take the following example of a User Control that wants to display a gradient background. The control is a GradientButton and it takes care of its own painting functionality:

When running on a device, a test application displays the button(s) and also a GradientLabel that is derived from the same GradientControl base class as expected. However, when creating the form you will not have a great designer experience, since the controls are not rendered the same way as they are on the device. Without doing anything, this will be the default designer experience:

Showing the User Controls as Visual Studio 2008 does is a pretty safe solution. Since User Controls might use (drawing) functionality that is exclusively available on the device, the decision of the Visual Studio is to just display a place holder for the control with the correct dimensions. Sometimes this might be sufficient, but what if you want to get a real WYSIWYG designer experience? By making use of designer attributes, which should be defined in a separate XMTA file (that defines designer attributes in XML), you can specify that your control is desktop compatible. What you are saying in that way is that you know for sure that Visual Studio’s designer should be able to render your User Control correctly. Adding <DesktopCompatible>true</DesktopCompatible> to my XMTA file (for both the GradientButton and GradientLabel) results in the following error message (one for each control on the form):

And, after acknowledging the error messages, in the following designer experience:

This experience is worse than the original way the designer showed our form. The problem that we encounter in this particular situation is the way the User Controls are painted. To paint a control with a gradient background, we need to P/Invoke to the native GradientFill method, that is defined in the managed control library in the following way:

The problem however is that, even though Windows 7 (as target operating system for Visual Studio 2008) has a GradientFill API, it is not defined in a DLL called coredll.dll, but instead, it is defined in a DLL called Msimg32.dll. To force Visual Studio to make use the GradientFill API from the latter DLL, we can make use of conditional compilation. Suppose we would change the P/Invoke declaration to the following and make sure that DESIGN_MODE is set, we should have a great designer experience:

However, in this situation you need to make sure that you undefined DESIGN_MODE prior to deploy the User Controls to the device. If you forget to do this, you will get runtime errors when running your application that makes use of these controls on the device. To limit possible runtime or design time errors, what you can do is make use of a new Build Configuration in Visual Studio. That is exactly what I did for this Control Library. Using the Configuration Manager I created a new configuration called DesignMode that is based upon the original Debug Configuration. I made sure to set uncheck the Deploy checkboxes in this configuration, resulting in a DesignMode build that will never be deployed to the device.

Additionality, in the Project Properties of my Control Library I defined the conditional compilation symbol DESIGN_MODE only for the DesignMode configuration.

Working with different configurations is great in this particular situation. Each time I want to open the form in designer mode, the first thing I am doing is changing to the DesignMode configuration. As a next step I rebuild my entire solution. After this, it is safe to open the form in the Visual Studio 2008 designer:

Once I am done modifying the form, I make sure to close the designer window inside Visual Studio 2008 for that particular form, change the configuration to either Debug or Release, rebuild the entire solution and after that, deploy the modified application to a target device. As you can see, there are a few steps involved to get a relatively acceptable designer experience when working with non standard controls, but for me, these extra steps are definitely worth investing in. After all, taking these extra steps I will get a WYWIWYG experience prior to deploying my application to a device or to the device emulator.

In one of the developer forums on MSDN an interesting question was asked around using the GPS sample code that is shipped as part of the Windows Mobile 6 SDK. Running the sample code as is always worked fine for me when running the sample code inside Device Emulator and making use of FakeGPS. The developer that asked the question was however running on a real device and noticed that the application was sometimes hanging on application close down or on stopping GPS data retrieval. Since I am very passionate about location aware applications I wanted to find out what is going on here. The beauty of Windows Mobile Sample code is that all source code is available for you. Of course there are disclaimers that the code is provided “AS IS” with no warranties. I understand that and I respect that. Well, after examining the GPSSample I strongly recommend not to use this for study purposes. I probably should go one step further and also warn you against using this sample as a managed wrapper around the GPS Intermediate Driver inside your production code. I have shown location aware applications based upon the Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Samples.Location namespace in How-Do-I for Devices videos, in Webcasts and during conferences like Tech-Ed. And only now I realize that I was extremely lucky because my code samples did not crash while demonstrating them.

Let me try to explain the issues I found with this particular sample and how to create a quick and dirty fix for them. I will only concentrate on the issues I found so far, but given the nature of these issues I would not be surprised if there are more issues. First let me show you an edited version of the class diagram of the Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Sample.Location assembly. It looks pretty nice, straight forward and easy to use, as it should be to be a useful managed wrapper around a lot of native code (being the GPS Intermediate Driver implementation).

The class GpsPosition has a large number of properties that allow you to easily retrieve GPS readings like Latitude and Longitude. However, you can also see that it defines two public methods, one called GetSatellitesInView, the other called GetSatellitesInSolution. The latter is an interesting one, since it returns the number of satellites that are used to obtain our current position. This number is equal or smaller to the number of satellites in view. This number of satellites that are used to obtain our position depends on information that is passed in an array containing extended satellite information. This is where the first potential problems in the GPSSample code can be found.

Here is the original code that is available in the GpsPosition.cs source file:

As you can see, the method GetSatellitesInSolution calls the method GetSatellitesInView internally. Now imagine that the variable dwSatellitesInView in the method GetSatellitesInView is 0. That means that the return value of this method will be null. In itself this is fine, but GetSatellitesInSolution is using it and does not check for a null return value, but instead simply uses the variable called inViewSatellites. If a null was returns, this means we will get a NullReferenceException, which in the GPSSample will be reported to the user when new GPS readings are updated in the main form. Solving this problem involves two modifications, the first one being a check for null in the GetSatellitesInSolution method that can be found in the source file GpsPosition.cs:

Since GetSatellitesInSolution can now return null as well, another modification should be made in the Form1.cs file of the GPSSample that makes use of this information. The UI of Form1 is updated inside this method with the highlighted code snippet causing the next potential problem:

Besides the potential problem the above code can cause, there is also a performance improvement possible. It is not necessary to call the position.GetSatellitesInView method (which is internally used in position.GetSatellitesInSolution). Instead, the property position.SatellitesInViewCount can be used that retrieves the same number that we want to display in the sample code. If you change the highlighted code into the following code, the easy problems are solved:

A more complex issue to solve:

Using the managed wrapper around the GPS Intermediate Driver you have the possibility to subscribe to LocationChanged and DeviceStateChanged events. If you subscribe to these events, your event handler will be called each time a change occurs in either location information (received from satellites) or device information (received from the connected GPS hardware). These changes are passed to your event handler(s) on a separate thread. This has a few consequences. The first one is that you cannot simply update UI Controls with the new readings that you can retrieve inside your event handler. If you take a look in the Form1.cs source file that is part of the GpsSample, you can see the following code snippet:

There is even some meaningful comment in this code snippet, because it is not allowed to update the UI immediately on any other thread then its creator. Instead, Control.Invoke is needed to update a UI control. Control.Invoke updates the UI control using the thread that created the UI control on behalf of the thread requesting the UI update. However, Control.Invoke is a synchronous method, it will block until the UI control is actually updated. Here is where our complex problem starts to appear. In order to understand the problem, we now have to take a look at the thread inside the source file Gps.cs that sets the events to inform any subscriber of new data being available. This is the thread responsible for that action:

In this code snippet I have highlighted a block containing the statement lock(this) which is a potential cause of hanging the sample application. During its lifetime, the thread that reads location information marks the entire GPS class as critical for the entire lifetime by calling lock(this). This means that this thread has exclusive access to everything that is defined in the class Gps, including the variables of type GpsPosition and GpsDeviceState that are passed as EventArgs when the event handlers inside Form1.cs are called.

The sample UI that is defined in Form1.cs tries to retrieve location information and device state information. In listing 4 you can see that, in order to display location information, a call to a method inside a GpsPosition object is made. Since this object is passed to us from inside the worker thread of listing 5, the thread wanting to retrieve that information (through Control.Invoke, being the main thread), will be blocked until the worker thread of listing 6 terminates. Well, guess what, the worker thread can only terminate when the user selects menu entries to Exit the application or to Stop GPS. This code can never execute, because our main thread is still waiting for the worker thread of listing 6 to terminate. This is a typical deadlock situation. Two different threads are waiting on each other, without any of them being able to release locked resources. The real problem is the fact that the worker thread of listing 6 contains lock(this) to protect variables. Even the MSDN documentation indicates this as something you should not do. In the sample everything in the class is locked, and probably only a few variables need to be protected against mutual access by different threads. Also, the lock is never released until the worker thread terminates, even though good practice is to protect variables against mutual access for a short a time as possible.

Since I don’t want to change too much code right now, I take a very pragmatic approach here (and in fact, you should do something similar if you are making use of the Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Samples.Location assembly with only the modifications as I described earlier in this blog entry implemented). Leaving the GPS.cs file as is (as most of possible), you can solve this deadlock situation by modifying the UI code. You already saw the two different locations where the screen is updated through an Invoke method (in listing 5). Since Control.Invoke works synchronously, the main thread will block until the thread that refreshes satellite readings will terminate. The problem is that this latter thread will only terminate when the main thread sets an event, which it can't do because it is blocked. And there is the deadlock situation. The quick and dirty solution to solve this problem is by modifying the code inside Form1.cs, not updating UI controls through Control.Invoke, but through Control.BeginInvoke, which is an asynchronous way of updating the UI control, not blocking the main thread. So if you modify the code inside Form1.cs to this, you have solved the potential deadlock situation, even though the Gps object is entirely locked by the data retrieval thread:

This should solve at least the most dramatic issues you might run into when playing with the GpsSample application, or (even worse) when using similar code inside your own (commercial) application. There are a few more issues with the sample code, for instance omitting to unsubscribe to event handlers. In this simple example this is not dramatic, but in a real application this might lead to managed memory leaks. All in all, I think it is time to completely revise the GpsSample and the Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Samples.Location assembly. Once the conference season is over for me on December 2nd and I don’t have to deliver presentations for a whole month at least, I will probably rewrite the entire sample and the managed wrappers and of course I will publish them, most likely both on DotNETForDevices and on Code Gallery.

I ran into a few challenges when displaying a DataGrid control inside a Windows Mobile application. The DataGrid only contains two different columns. One of the columns must have a fixed length that is determined by the title of the column. The other column will have a variable width, depending on the display orientation mode of the device and also depending on the presence or absence of both a column header and a vertical ScrollBar. Also, the number of pixels occupied by column separators must be taken into consideration. To retrieve the width of the column header and the width of an individual column separator, a little bit of reflection is needed. The column header width is stored in a private instance variable of the DataGrid with the name v_cxDefaultRowHdrWidth. The width of one single column separator is stored in a private instance variable of the DataGrid with the name v_cxyDefaultResizePixel. Even though both values are stored in private instance variables of the DataGrid, you can retrieve them through reflection, as shown in the following code snippet:

To measure the size of one of the column headers dynamically, which is necessary because the application will be localized, it is possible to call out to MeasureString, a method that is exposed on the Graphics class. To set the correct width of this column, the following code snippet is used:

The code snippet shown above also adds two times the width of an individual column separator, since the column is surrounded by two different column separators. What I showed so far is relatively easy and straight forward. The real challenge came when trying to adjust the column width of the other column, depending on presence or absence of a ScrollBar. My original idea was to P/Invoke to the Win32 API GetSystemMetrics when a vertical ScrollBar is displayed in the DataGrid. To determine if a ScrollBar is present I used the following if statement:

It turned out that the if statement shown above is not the best approach. My idea was that a vertical scroll bar would be displayed automatically if the number of records visible in the DataGrid is smaller than the number of records available in the underlying BindingSource. This is usually the case, but I found out that a record in the DataGrid is considered visible, even if only a small part of it is visible in the DataGrid. Finding this out was purely coincidental. When testing the application with a database containing 10 records and changing the display orientation mode of the test device from portrait to landscape, it seemed that I had 10 records visible (so no need for a vertical ScrollBar). However, in reality there were only 9.5 records visible, meaning a vertical ScrollBar was displayed, and because I didn’t adjust properly for this, a horizontal ScrollBar was displayed as well. Solving this problem took a bit of thinking and a bit of interrogating DataGrid members. A DataGrid is a control container, being able to host other controls. Without adding additional controls myself, I found out that a DataGrid already owns to Controls, a horizontal and a vertical ScrollBar. After finding this out, the solution to my original problem all of a sudden became easy, and I also could get rid of the original way to measure the width of the vertical ScrollBar through P/Invoke. So instead of the previously displayed if statement, the code now has changed into the following:

With verticalDataGridScrollBarIdx defined as 1. Not only does this an accurate indication if the ScrollBar is visible, the performance of this particular piece of code is better as well, since there is no need to P/Invoke to a native Win32 API. Since the column with the fixed length is making use of reflection to determine the width, its width is only calculated once. This improves performance as well, especially since reflection, like P/Invoking to native code consists of ‘expensive’ operations as far as performance is concerned. A more complete sample snippet now looks like this:

And that is it. Knowing a bit more about the internal operation of the DataGrid, combined with a bit of thinking, just led to more efficient code that is working better as well.

It seems that there are almost no live MSDN Webcasts around Windows Mobile Application Development these days. Personally I would have liked to see at least one new Webcast as month, preferably even more. Since this is not the case, I like to point you out to a number of archived Webcasts that might be relevant for starting and experienced Windows Mobile developers. The following links all point to pages on the MSDN Code Gallery. If you are not familiar with this collection of sample code, these links might be a great starting point to start exploring sample code for all kinds of Microsoft technologies. If you are interested in Windows Mobile related sample code, and want to listen to the Webcasts that showed the sample code in action, just click on one of the following links:

• Creating Location Aware Applications for Windows Mobile
• NET CF Asynchronous Programming Techniques
• Dealing with different form factors on Windows Mobile Devices
• Developing battery-friendly applications
• Interoperability between managed and native code
• Using the GPS Intermediate Driver
• Using Pocket Outlook inside a managed application
• Windows Mobile Device security

Over the upcoming weeks I will make sure to publish more sample code of archived Webcasts. I hope to keep everybody who reads this blog excited about Windows Mobile Application development in this way. If you, like me, would like to see more MSDN Webcasts around Windows Mobile development topics, you might want to suggest so at one of the Windows Mobile Forums, which by the way are also a great location to ask all your questions around Windows Mobile Application Development.

Enterprise Data Synchronization with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server Compact 3.5 by Rob Tiffany

This book is a must read for every developer who deals with storing data on Windows Mobile devices and who has the need to synchronize that data with a server. Realistically speaking, the majority of applications on Mobile Devices deal with some form of data synchronization. Tiffany starts by identifying some of the challenges and taking a look at one of the best occasionally connected applications (Microsoft Outlook) available on the market. The book focuses on Merge Replication, a Microsoft-supported technology to efficiently synchronize data between one or more servers and multiple clients. Tiffany starts by explaining the architecture of Merge Replication and he introduces a number of scenarios where Data Synchronization is essential.

In his book, Tiffany introduces a hypothetical company to explain all details about setting up a large distributed application. Each chapter in the book explains a particular subsystem. By making use of virtualization, it is possible for the reader to take Tiffany’s example, experiment with it and built upon it. In this way, this book gets you real hands-on information that is very valuable for your day-to-day work. Tiffany starts the example by talking about securing the data and limiting the amount of users that are allowed to share / synchronize data. After covering security and showing you hands-on examples, a realistic database is introduced that will be used throughout the remainder of the book. The next important step that is described in full detail is how to configure the server correctly to distribute data amongst clients. Throughout the explanation of properly configuring different subsystems, the author also gives a number of great performance tips that are for a large part based on his own experience working with large databases for enterprise organizations. Since Merge Replication makes use of IIS to actually sends data from servers to clients vv, Tiffany also discusses proper configuration of IIS intensively, again accompanied by numerous tips to get the best performance for your system. In the last chapters of the book, you will actually learn how to setup subscriber code in order to synchronize data with the client devices. The book really focuses on how to synchronize data between servers and clients, not so much on how to present data on client devices. This particular topic is covered in many other publications, both online and in print.

The approach, Tiffany takes for this book is efficient, pleasant to read, and allows you to learn to setup secure synchronization between a server database and a large number of clients, each caching data locally until they have a network connection to efficiently synchronize data back and forth. Thanks to the pleasant, to-the-point writing style and the step-by-step approach to setup Merge Replication, this book is very valuable to everybody who wants to synchronize data with mobile devices. After working through the entire book and re-creating all steps that Tiffany explains in the book, you should be able to efficiently and safely synchronize data between a server and a large number of clients yourself.

The title of this blog entry is perhaps a little misleading. Everybody who has developed Managed Applications for Windows Mobile Devices knows that it takes some time until the application is up and running. Amongst others, this is caused by the fact that the Common Language Runtime (CLR) needs to be initialized, assemblies need to be loaded and, in order to execute, quite a few methods need to be JIT’d. This simple managed application takes a little over a second to start.

A native application, written in C++, will start much faster. In fact, it only takes about 10% of the time to start a comparable simple managed application. So what if you would be able to combine the starting speed of a native application with the developer productivity of a managed application? This new article on DotNETForDevices explains how to use a Native Windows Mobile Application that programmatically starts a Managed Windows Mobile Application. The Native Application can for instance display a splash screen to the user while the Managed Application is starting in the background. The article not only explains this approach in detail, it also comes with a complete downloadable sample.

One of the interesting new features available for Windows Mobile 6.5 Devices is native support for gestures. In the Windows Mobile 6.5 documentation, gestures are defined as “short, directional movements over a control or object on the screen”.  The functionality to make use of Windows Mobile 6.5 Gestures is implemented in a static native library. This means that this functionality is not immediately available for Managed Application Developers.

To make this functionality available for Managed Developers, DotNETForDevices is happy to announce the immediate availability of a whitepaper and sample code to use Windows Mobile 6.5 Gestures in managed code.

The sample code combines the GestureAPISamples that are shipped as part of the Windows Mobile 6.5 DTK, with identical functionality, but of course entirely executing in managed code.

You can download the whitepaper from this location:

The sample code is available at the same location:

The source code of the GestureHelper Type Library is absolutely royalty free. Take the code, play with it and modify it to meet your own requirements. However, the source code is shipped as is. You will be using the code at your own risk. 

In preparation for my attempt to provide a managed solution for one of the Windows Mobile 6.5 DTK samples I needed a simple solution to scroll a large picture inside a managed application. My first attempt, painting the image directly on the Main Form and creating Scroll Bars manually, is working but rather complex. It involves changing the style of the Main Form, which after all is a Window, by P/Invoking SetWindowLong to add Scroll Bars to the form, making use of the SetScrollInfo and GetScrollInfo APIs to initialize the Scroll Bars properly and to retrieve the current position of the Scroll Bars. Besides that, it also involves dealing with Scroll Bar messages and calling the ScrollWindowEx API, not the most P/Invoke friendly API in the world. However, there is a much simpler solution, making use of a PictureBox control.

In this picture, you will see an ordinary Windows Form with a PictureBox on it and two menu entries that simulate programmatically scrolling of the picture (something I need for one of the Windows Mobile 6.5 DTK Gesture samples).

During application initialization, the PictureBox is initialized with a Bitmap, and its size is adjusted to hold the entire Bitmap. You need to make sure that the Docking property of the PictureBox is set to DockStyle.None. As you can see in the first figure, fully functional Scroll Bars are displayed to be able to scroll through the picture. To programmatically scroll through the picture, it is possible to make use of a number of Windows Messages, as shown in the first code snippet.

The important thing here is that the Scroll Bars are not reachable through the PictureBox, but through the Main Form, so the Windows Messages are in fact being sent to the Main Form. Since the Main Form has scrolling logic implemented (because the Scroll Bars do react upon user input), it is also safe to send WM_HSCROLL and WM_VSCROLL messages to it programmatically. The performance is pretty good and it hardly takes any code in this way. This is the complete code for this simple example (assuming you have a Bitmap available as a resource):

Something similar can be done by displaying a Bitmap inside a Panel Control, but in that case you are responsible for painting the image yourself, a bit more work with no real added value.

Since many people blogged about the availability of the Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Toolkit (DTK), I will not bore you with repeating that information. However, if you downloaded this toolkit you might be a bit disappointed by the current lack of documentation. I am sure that Microsoft will document all new functionality at a later time, but right now you might have to dig into sample source code to understand what new functionality is available. The Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional DTK ships with 3 different samples that show you how to make use of gestures. A useful definition of gestures is found in the Windows 7 documentation on MSDN: “A gesture is a quick movement of one or more fingers on a screen that the computer interprets as a command, rather than as a mouse movement, writing, or drawing”. Since Windows Mobile 6 devices do not support multi-touch, the quick movement of more fingers on a screen is irrelevant for this discussion.

The sample code provided in this blog entry is a work in progress. Right now, you will find a managed wrapper around the Gesture API’s that has enough functionality to rebuild the GestureMetricsSample that is part of the Windows Mobile 6.5 DTK. In additional blog entries I will show you how to implement the other native gesture samples in managed code as well. This could lead to a useful wrapper around the Gesture API’s for Windows Mobile 6.5, although I can’t give you guarantees at this moment.

About the implementation

To make use of Gestures inside your Windows Mobile 6.5 application you get a number of API’s that are defined in the header file gesture.h. These API’s can be used to get information about Gestures. Since there is no documentation about these API’s available at this moment I simply tried to translate the native sample without worrying too much about the functionality that those API’s provide. Besides the Gesture API’s, you will also need to act on an additional Windows message being WM_GESTURE. If you look up WM_GESTURE on MSDN you will find preliminary documentation about this Windows message. However, this documentation is for Windows 7 and after taking a look at the documentation, it seems that the functionality of the WM_GESTURE message used in Windows Mobile 6.5 is similar but differs in details. Using the Visual Studio 2008 debugger, it turns out that each mouse message that we receive inside a Windows Mobile 6.5 application is followed by one or more WM_GESTURE messages. You can process these WM_GESTURE messages and, depending on the parameters passed to the WM_GESTURE message, retrieve information about the Gesture using the Gesture API’s.

To make use of Gestures inside a managed application there are a few challenges to overcome. First off, the Gesture APIs are not published in a DLL, so simply P/Invoking to those API’s is not an option inside managed code. Secondly, you need to process WM_GESTURE messages, and those messages don’t have corresponding event handlers inside managed assemblies. This is understandable, because the WM 6.5 DTK does not contain additional managed assemblies. In fact, if you take a look at the header files and libraries that are part of the Window Mobile 6.5 DTK, you will see that there are only a few new files available, as indicated by the following two pictures.

The fact that Gesture functionality is made available through a static library means that we cannot simply P/Invoke to the Gesture APIs. So I have decided to create my own DLL in native code that acts as a wrapper around the Gesture APIs. This allows me to P/Invoke to my own native DLL which in turn can call Gesture APIs that are published in a static library. This wrapper DLL has (amongst others) the following functions available:

These functions either call Gesture API’s immediately or do some translation before returning to a caller. For instance, if you want to get Gesture information, screen coordinates are used to retrieve locations where gestures begin or end. Since I am interested in working with client coordinates, or in other words, being only interested in activity inside my own client area, I translate screen coordinates into client coordinates before returning information to a caller.

Besides the Gesture APIs, you also need to process WM_GESTURE messages. This is a bit trickier if you want to process those messages inside a managed application. Here, the MessageWindow class, which is defined in the Microsoft.WindowsCE.Forms namespace, comes in handy. In the sample code that is available at the end of this blog entry, you can see that I am making use of good old Win32 sub classing to get my hands to the Windows procedure of the application that I want to make use of Gestures. Since I want to process WM_GESTURE messages inside a managed application, simply sub classing a Windows Form is not sufficient. I also need to pass the WM_GESTURE messages to my managed application. This is something that can be done using a MessageWindows class. If you take a look at the native code that is responsible for sub classing the managed form, you will see that it also stores a second Windows handle, the one that is provided by the MessageWindow. By just catching WM_GESTURE messages in the sub classed Window procedure and immediately sending them to the MessageWindow, I can now process those messages in a managed application. All other messages are just passed on to the original Windows procedure.

To get WM_GESTURE messages inside my managed application, the first thing I am doing is calling the SubclassForm function, from inside a managed class that derives from MessageWindow.

As you can see, I am passing both the handle to the form for which I want to make use of gestures as well as the handle to the MessageWindow. Since my native wrapper immediately sends each WM_GESTURE message to the (hidden) MessageWindow, I can now take action on those messages inside managed code by overriding the MessageWindow WndProc. To get gesture information to the form I am simply raising a number of events.

Inside my (main) form in my managed application I can now simply act on events each time gesture information is received.

The sample code that is available for download contains all functionality described in this blog entry. The source code is not fully documented and might change while I start working on making the other WM 6.5 DTK samples available as managed code samples. Also, this blog entry does not entirely document the things I did in order to get this sample working. However, this blog entry together with the sample code should get you in a direction to start using Windows Mobile 6.5 Gestures inside a managed application yourself. Over the next few weeks I will publish more information about this topic, which might lead to a full whitepaper to be published on DotNETForDevices in the end.

Download the Windows Mobile 6.5 Managed GestureMetrics sample here.

NOTE: In order to run the sample code you must have Visual Studio 2008 Professional or better installed on your development system, together with the Windows Mobile 6 Professional SDK and the Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional Developer Toolkit.

As the author of the RampUp track for Windows Mobile I received some feedback from people who are studying the material. The first piece of feedback was about our focus on managed application development. Currently we are indeed focusing only on managed development using either Visual Basic.NET or C#. If you feel the need for a track on Windows Mobile native application development using C or C++ as well, just let me know. If enough people are interested in developing native applications for Windows Mobile devices I will pass the feedback on to the RampUp content owners who might decide to extend the Windows Mobile track with an additional native development module.

The second piece of feedback I received today was around connecting a Device Emulator through either Active Sync (Windows XP) or the Windows Mobile Device Center (Windows Vista). In order to do so, you need to make sure that DMA (Direct Memory Access) is selected as connection mechanism. The following picture shows you how to set this up for the Windows Mobile Device Center:

With the connections set properly, Device Emulator should be able to cradle, using either Windows Mobile Device Center or Active Sync.

If you have additional feedback, don’t hesitate to let me know. It may take a day or two, but I will reply to your feedback.

Maarten Struys

This year we once again have a very nice line-up of Windows Mobile Sessions at Tech-Ed. If you happen to be in Los Angeles to attend the largest Microsoft Developer and IT-Pro conference, make sure to attend as much Windows Mobile Sessions as you can. Not only will you learn a lot, you also have the opportunity to win cool stuff. Here is an overview of all the sessions we have prepared for you. If you want to know more about location aware application development for Windows Mobile devices, not only through GPS, but also through Cell Tower ID and IP address lookup, we will have an appointment tomorrow, Tuesday May 12 at 8.30 AM in room 511. Here is a sneak preview of the demos I will share with you:

As you hopefully can see, the demo application can retrieve location information from either Cell, IP address or GPS. It also has the possibility to display a variety of Virtual Earth maps, not inside a browser but just inside a PictureBox. Finally the appliation allows to update status information on social networks, finds nearby places of interest through Live Search and adds location information to pictures taken with the device camera. Curious? Tomorrow I will explain all the details of this application and more.

With only a few lines of code you will be able to display a Virtual Earth Map inside a PictureBox control on a Windows Mobile Device. In the past I have shown how to display VE Maps inside a Browser control, with the disadvantage that you see the map loading. At one time I even used multiple Browser controls, switching the Visible property on the DocumentCompleted event being fired. Well, all of this is not necessary. You can just retrieve Virtual Earth Maps and show them inside a PictureBox once they are available. Besides setting up your Virtual Earth request, only a few lines of code are needed to do the trick:

MapUriResponse mapUriResponse = imageryService.GetMapUri(mapUriRequest);

HttpWebRequest request =

    (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(mapUriResponse.Uri);

HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

Image img = new Bitmap(response.GetResponseStream());

response.Close();

More details will follow right after Tech-Ed USA in two weeks or so.

If you want to know more about having a great viewing experience of Virtual Earth Maps on Windows Mobile Devices, you basically only need three lines of code. Curious? Just wait until after Tech-Ed 2009 USA. I will reveal the details to you in a few weeks.

MapUriResponse mapUriResponse = imageryService.GetMapUri(mapUriRequest);

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(

     mapUriResponse.Uri);

HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

If you want to learn how to create a full blown Windows Mobile Application from scratch using Visual Studio 2008 this is your chance. Over the upcoming months DotNETForDevices will show you how to create DVDsMobile, an application that stores a personal collection of DVD’s, can add DVD’s to a wish list, makes use of location awareness to find nearby DVD stores, makes use of a Web Service to quickly enter DVD information and consists of one single binary, being able to target multiple different Windows Mobile Devices. Besides an article and a growing number of downloadable videos, all source code will be made available for download at a later stage, as well as a complete book, explaining the entire application and introducing best practices to develop applications for Windows Mobile Devices. Today, the first video is available for download. In this video you will see how to create an initial Windows Mobile 6 Standard application using C#. The application does not have much functionality yet, but is localized. Check out this new DotNETForDevices initiative at this link.

Thanks to everybody who attended my last MSDN Webcast yesterday. Even though it was a 90 minute webcast, we were running a bit out of time in the end. Hopefully you still got a lot out of this webcast. It feels bad to say goodbye to MSDN Webcasts, at the same time it feels great that this webcast is listed as one of the top five on-demand webcasts, at least right now. If you missed it, it is available for on-demand viewing now. Just click at this link.

I am looking for alternative hosting possibilities to continue presenting live for everybody who is interested in Windows Mobile Application Development. Until I have an alternative live streaming solution available, I will at least make sure to overflow you with downloadable videos in the upcoming weeks / months.

As promised, here is some follow-up for the Webcast. Here you can download the Windows Mobile 6 SDKs. One of the questions yesterday was around using Accelerometer functionality inside your own managed applications. You can take a look at Peter Nowak’s blog for more information. Also, if you are interested in the sample code that I showed you yesterday, you can download all samples by just clicking here.

If you are all excited about developing applications for Windows Mobile devices I strongly recommend you to also take a look at the 24 Hours of Windows Mobile Application Development Webcast series. This series covers lots of different topics around developing applications for Windows Mobile devices, mainly in managed code. Microsoft Windows Mobile Team: thank you very much for creating this fantastic series of Webcasts for all of us.

While developing some training material around Windows Mobile application development using Visual Studio 2008 I found an interesting issue. Those of you who have used strongly typed DataSets probably know that Visual Studio has excellent support in creating those DataSets for you. If you let Visual Studio 2008 generate strongly typed SqlCeResultSets you get similar support, although a bit limited. In one area, designer support does not really help you and it might even take some time finding out what the problem is. Here is my scenario. I want to create a Master – Detail view using strongly typed SqlCeResultSets, using the Orders and Order Details tables of the Northwind Database. The first steps are fine. Start by creating a new DataSource and change the Custom Tool in the Properties Window to generate a SqlCeResultSet (MSResultSetGenerator) instead of a DataSet (MSDataSetGenerator).
 
Dragging and dropping a DataGrid from the Data Sources Window works as expected. The DataGrid is created, together with a BindingSource and the DataGrid is populated. Unlike DataSets, being in memory representations of the underlying DataSource that also maintain relations between tables, SqlCeResultSets are scrollable cursors that work directly on tables in the database. Therefore, the DataGrid can actually show the underlying data, even in designer mode.  It also means that you need to provide some code yourself to create the relationship between the master and details table.

However, when dragging and dropping detailed information from the Order Details table gave some surprising results. Even though we are working on a completely different table, it tries to make use of the same BindingSource that was created for the Orders table as you can see below. This of course will lead to runtime exceptions, since fields in the Order Details table are not defined in the Orders table.

The remedy is simple but involves some work on your side. You have to create a new BindingSource yourself and set its DataSource property to the Order_DetailsResultSet and only then drag and drop UI controls from the Order Details table to the form.

Now Visual Studio will ask you what BindingSource to use and you can specify the just created BindingSource. This time, things are fine.

My question though, why is it so hard to do this as part of the designer? It can’t be rocket science, right? I think that Visual Studio 2008 is a fantastic development environment, but little issues like this one are very annoying. To me it almost seems that SqlCeResultSets are second class citizens compared to DataSets, even though they have huge advantages for Windows Mobile developers, targeting devices with limited resources. I guess the answer has to do something with the fact that DataSets exist from day one when we started talking about managed applications for the desktop as well. So the question really is different. Are device developers second class citizens for Microsoft that need to sort out these kinds of little issues themselves? I personally would rather have no designer support at all instead of something that is working in one situation but not in another situation.

If you happen to be in Los Angeles, CA between May 11 and May 15 to attend TechEd USA 2009 we have a great opportunity to meet in person. I will be working at the Windows Mobile Booth for at least a few hours each day. I also invite you to my breakout session at TechEd USA. If you want to know more about developing Location Aware Windows Mobile applications and if you want to learn how to make use of the Virtual Earth Web Services to retrieve mapping information, you will just have the change. Search in your session catalog for session WMB301. Here are the details of the session which is scheduled for May 12 at 8.30 AM:

WMB301: Creating Location-Aware Applications for Windows Mobile Devices

More and more Windows Mobile powered devices ship with integrated global positioning system (GPS) hardware. Since Windows Mobile devices are typically used on the road, it makes a lot of sense to add location awareness to your applications. In the upcoming future, Maarten Struys foresees location-aware applications moving beyond traditional navigation software. Adding location awareness to all kinds of social networking applications could be the next big thing for Windows Mobile devices. In this sample-filled session, Maarten shows you how you can make use of the GPS Intermediate Driver to retrieve GPS information from inside managed applications. Learn how to use the FakeGPS utility to test location-enabled applications without needing access to a physical GPS device and also learn how to feed FakeGPS with your own recorded location information. Of course, you will also see a real location-aware application, based on the Microsoft Virtual Earth Web Service, on a Windows Mobile Device in action.

I am looking forward to meeting you at TechEd 2009.

If you happen to be in Los Angeles, CA between May 11 and May 15 to attend TechEd USA 2009 we have a great opportunity to meet in person. I will be working at the Windows Mobile Booth for at least a few hours each day. I also invite you to my breakout session at TechEd USA. If you want to know more about developing Location Aware Windows Mobile applications and if you want to learn how to make use of the Virtual Earth Web Services to retrieve mapping information, you will just have the change. Search in your session catalog for session WMB301. Here are the details of the session which is scheduled for May 12 at 8.30 AM:

WMB301: Creating Location-Aware Applications for Windows Mobile Devices

More and more Windows Mobile powered devices ship with integrated global positioning system (GPS) hardware. Since Windows Mobile devices are typically used on the road, it makes a lot of sense to add location awareness to your applications. In the upcoming future, Maarten Struys foresees location-aware applications moving beyond traditional navigation software. Adding location awareness to all kinds of social networking applications could be the next big thing for Windows Mobile devices. In this sample-filled session, Maarten shows you how you can make use of the GPS Intermediate Driver to retrieve GPS information from inside managed applications. Learn how to use the FakeGPS utility to test location-enabled applications without needing access to a physical GPS device and also learn how to feed FakeGPS with your own recorded location information. Of course, you will also see a real location-aware application, based on the Microsoft Virtual Earth Web Service, on a Windows Mobile Device in action.

I am looking forward to meeting you at TechEd 2009.

For everybody who knows me a little bit and has followed me over the last years, it must be clear that I am passionate about MSDN Webcasts and that I really like to present Webcasts on a broad range of topics, preferably live, either alone or with one or more co-presenters. However, those Webcasts run typically for 60 minutes, and besides my own series around creating a Windows Mobile Line-of-Business application, back in 2006, we were never really focusing on creating a complete application from scratch and guiding you through the entire application. That is the reason why I will start a new initiative within a few days. Unfortunately this is not going to be a live event, since I am hosting it on DotNETForDevices, where I don’t have the possibility to present live for you. However, thanks to the great work of the folks at TechSmith, I do have the possibility to create a series of videos for you, using Camtasia, in which I will create a Windows Mobile application step-by-step, showing you each and every statement that I am adding to my project and also explaining to you how the application works and informing you about pitfalls and lacks in documentation for Windows Mobile developers.

The application I am planning to develop is an application I wanted to have for a long time. I have a huge DVD collection, and sometimes, when shopping at a store I am wondering if I already have a particular DVD or not. Having my Windows Mobile Device always with me, wouldn’t it be great to have an application that shows all the DVD’s I currently own. Especially if that application is also capable of showing which DVD’s I definitely want to purchase. In that way, I can make sure that I will buy those DVD’s I really want to have, but also making sure that I am not accidentally purchasing a DVD that is already in my collection.

Since I have a variety of Windows Mobile Devices I want to make sure that the application is running on devices with and without touch screens and that the transition from one device to another is seamless. I also want to have the possibility to synchronize my DVD collection with a back-end server, in this case a database on my development machine that was created by SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. On my Windows Mobile Device I like to have a local data cache as well, for which I will use SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition version 3.5. And of course I want to make use of the latest version of the .NET Compact Framework, being version 3.5. I will use Visual Studio 2008 to develop the application and I will make use of Sync Services for ADO.NET to synchronize my local client database with the back-end server (being my development machine). Since I am living in The Netherlands and also have a number of localized Windows Mobile Devices, I also want to make sure that the application is localized.

While developing this application, I will tell you more about using DataSets, SqlCeResultSets and perhaps one or two other methods to efficiently access the local data store on the device.

To ease entering new DVD’s and adding DVD’s to my personal wish list, I will make use of a Web Service. The application will also be location aware, for instance to find a store near my current location where I can purchase DVD’s. Last but not least, for my existing collection of DVD’s I will also make use of a built-in camera on my Windows Mobile Device to take a picture of inlays of existing DVD’s.

Last but not least, I will also create both a Device CAB Installer and a Desktop Installer to deploy the application to the device, optionally deploying the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 and SQL Server CE 3.5 to the device as well.

It might take quite some time to develop the entire application, but if you will join me during this series, not only will you learn more about developing a full blown application for Windows Mobile devices, you will also learn what I like about developing managed applications for Windows Mobile devices, but also about my pain points and issues that are coming up while I am developing this application. Besides the videos that will be published on DotNETForDevices, you also have the chance to download all source code and make use of it in your own application. And all for free! So hopefully you will join me over the next few months. I have an idea about this application right now, but I don’t have a clue what it will look like in the end or if it can be created at all. Are you as curious about the end-result as I am? Well, make sure to regularly check back at my blog to find more news about DVDsMobile.

Tomorrow, September 10, 2008, we will continue our MSDN Webcast series around developing managed applications for Windows Mobile Devices. During this Webcast, Constanze Roman and I will show you how you can use the Device Emulator to its full extend. You will find out how you can use Device Emulator to run your single application on multiple devices, we will show you how to use Device Emulator in combination with Cellular Emulator to test cellular connections and how to set different security scenarios to Device Emulator to closely mimic real world devices. Make sure to sign up at this link, because seats are limited. Oh, by the way, tomorrow's webcast starts at 10.00 AM PST, as will all other webcasts in this series.

Tomorrow, September 3, 2008, we will start a brand new MSDN Webcast series around developing managed applications for Windows Mobile Devices. Several of the best speakers will contribute to this series over the upcoming months. We are working hard to get all titles in place, but I am glad to inform you that we kick off tomorrow with an introduction to Windows Mobile Development. Make sure to sign up at this link, because seats are limited. Oh, by the way, tomorrow's webcast starts at 10.00 AM PST, as will all other webcasts in this series.

Hopefully this is going to be good news for you, especially for those of you who want to start developing applications for Windows Mobile Devices. Starting September 1 I will try to publish one Windows Mobile developer video / day, weekends excluded, beginning with some very basic information, but over the months more complex topics will be covered as well. During the series you will also learn more about both the C# and Visual Basic.NET programming languages. Here is the preliminary agenda for the first two weeks.

September 1 – Introduction in Windows Mobile Device Development.

September 2 – Different types of Windows Mobile Devices

September 3 – What tools do you need to develop Windows Mobile Applications.

September 4 – Different types of Windows Mobile Devices

September 5 - My first Windows Mobile Application (from here onwards all sample code will be available for download, in some cases including full documentation).

September 8 – Events and event handlers

September 9 – Event driven application development

September 10 – Buttons and Labels

September 11 – Text boxes and the Input panel

September  12 - The Status Bar

Hopefully you will check my blog at www.dotnetfordevices.com regularly starting September 1^st when I will take up this new challenge to deliver one Windows Mobile Device Development video / day until the end of the year, with the exception of conference weeks when I have speaking obligations.

Hopefully this is going to be good news for you, especially for those of you who want to start developing applications for Windows Mobile Devices. Starting September 1 I will try to publish one Windows Mobile developer video / day, weekends excluded, beginning with some very basic information, but over the months more complex topics will be covered as well. During the series you will also learn more about both the C# and Visual Basic.NET programming languages. Here is the preliminary agenda for the first two weeks.

September 1 – Introduction in Windows Mobile Device Development.

September 2 – Different types of Windows Mobile Devices

September 3 – What tools do you need to develop Windows Mobile Applications.

September 4 – Different types of Windows Mobile Devices

September 5 - My first Windows Mobile Application (from here onwards all sample code will be available for download, in some cases including full documentation).

September 8 – Events and event handlers

September 9 – Event driven application development

September 10 – Buttons and Labels

September 11 – Text boxes and the Input panel

September  12 - The Status Bar

Hopefully you will check my blog at www.dotnetfordevices.com regularly starting September 1^st when I will take up this new challenge to deliver one Windows Mobile Device Development video / day until the end of the year, with the exception of conference weeks when I have speaking obligations.

You might think it is still a long time until November 10 but time is flying. Between November 10 and November 14 the place for you to be is Barcelona in Spain. For 5 whole days you have the chance to learn everything there is to know around Microsoft technologies for software developers. You can select sessions from 15 different technical tracks, including of course Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded tracks. With over 4000 attendees expected, this is a huge event focussed towards developers. You can choose from over 200 breakout sessions, over 90 interactive sessions and learn about new technologies by running a large number of different self-paced hands on labs. It might still seem far away, but November is approaching fast. Make sure to be part of TechEd EMEA Developers 2008 by registering here. If you want to find out more about this event you can check the official TechEd EMEA 2008 Developers Web Site. For one thing, I am looking forward to meeting you in person in Barcelona, either at one of the Windows Embedded / Windows Mobile booths or during one of my three or four scheduled sessions during this year's TechEd EMEA.

I want to thank everybody who attended our Webcast on Unit Testing for Devices this morning. Hopefully we were able to convince you that Unit Testing is not only cool, but also really helps you to create higher quality software. As promised, here is all sample code we used in today's webcast. And don't forget to meet Constanze and me again during our next Webcast, hosted by AT&T. Our next appointment is Friday July 25th at 10.00 AM PTS. Just make sure to register here.

Before even showing you a screen dump of the application I am going to talk about, I want to make sure that you check your calendars and I hope you all have time available to meet Constanze Roman and myself on July 25th at 10.00 AM PST when we will present an AT&T Webcast around location aware applications for Windows Mobile Devices. Hopefully you will be able to join us. Constanze gave me a UI mockup for an electronic compass with some additional information, and she promised to do some live coding during our webcast to turn this into a working electronic compass for Windows Mobile devices, making use of the GPS Intermediate Driver. It looks like I have the 'honor' to test her application, making use of FakeGPS.

Besides showing how to create an application like this, there will be more cool content during this AT&T Webcast. Constanze will show us how to use a little native application to record GPS data for test purposes, and I will show you how to not only test Constanze's application, but I will also show you how the GPS Intermediate Driver allows you to run multiple applications that all need GPS data simultaneously. As soon as we have a registration link for this webcast, I will make it available through this blog.

Before even showing you a screen dump of the application I am going to talk about, I want to make sure that you check your calendars and I hope you all have time available to meet Constanze Roman and myself on July 25th at 10.00 AM PST when we will present an AT&T Webcast around location aware applications for Windows Mobile Devices. Hopefully you will be able to join us. Constanze gave me a UI mockup for an electronic compass with some additional information, and she promised to do some live coding during our webcast to turn this into a working electronic compass for Windows Mobile devices, making use of the GPS Intermediate Driver. It looks like I have the 'honor' to test her application, making use of FakeGPS.

Besides showing how to create an application like this, there will be more cool content during this AT&T Webcast. Constanze will show us how to use a little native application to record GPS data for test purposes, and I will show you how to not only test Constanze's application, but I will also show you how the GPS Intermediate Driver allows you to run multiple applications that all need GPS data simultaneously. As soon as we have a registration link for this webcast, I will make it available through this blog.

Here is a unique chance for you to actually see a few of our Windows Mobile experts in a discussion around Windows Mobile Application Development. Lots of topics are covered, like our own personal opinions about native versus managed applications, making use of the Device Emulator, using the remote tools etc. You definitely don't want to miss this discussion. The only bad thing about this video, it is hard to watch myself, I think I look silly, so if you just want to have a laugh, you should definitely watch the video as well. 

On July 23rd at 10 AM PST, Constanze Roman and I will present an MSDN Webcast covering Unit Testing for Devices, live from Redmond. This Webcast is based upon the talk I gave during TechEd USA 2008, but it does contain new material and brand new demos. You will learn how to create Unit Tests for Devices using Visual Studio 2008, how to run those unit tests, how to debug your unit tests and how to automate Unit Testing by executing your tests from a command prompt. Of course this webcast will be loaded samples and you have the opportunity to get all your questions answered if you join us during this live event. Make sure to register online today, because the number of seats is limited.  

Here is a unique chance for you to actually see a few of our Windows Mobile experts in a discussion around Windows Mobile Application Development. Lots of topics are covered, like our own personal opinions about native versus managed applications, making use of the Device Emulator, using the remote tools etc. You definitely don't want to miss this discussion. The only bad thing about this video, it is hard to watch myself, I think I look silly, so if you just want to have a laugh, you should definitely watch the video as well. 

On July 23rd at 10 AM PST, Constanze Roman and I will present an MSDN Webcast covering Unit Testing for Devices, live from Redmond. This Webcast is based upon the talk I gave during TechEd USA 2008, but it does contain new material and brand new demos. You will learn how to create Unit Tests for Devices using Visual Studio 2008, how to run those unit tests, how to debug your unit tests and how to automate Unit Testing by executing your tests from a command prompt. Of course this webcast will be loaded samples and you have the opportunity to get all your questions answered if you join us during this live event. Make sure to register online today, because the number of seats is limited.  

Right now this still sounds as a very ambitious project, but after a little vacation break coming up soon, this could be the next real thing. I am already in the planning stage to create a lot of free sample videos on how to create applications for Windows Mobile Devices. There are still some challenges of hosting them on my blog, unless I will make the media files available for download only. But I am also looking into making them available to you immediately by making use of the great multi-media capabilities of Silverlight. Apart from the way this content will be delivered, you can expect tons of information and samples around creating your first Windows Mobile application, making use of location awareness, using WCF, incorporating LINQ and many, many other topics. I hope you will revisit this blog frequently. I will try to make it the best resource to create Windows Mobile Applications by showing you lots of sample code, delivering one video each day during the September / October time frame. Of course, all sample source code will be available for download as well, together with complete documentation of the samples.

Thanks everybody who attended my 3 sessions over the last week. During each of my sessions I have promised to make the sample source code available. I make you an even better deal. The slide decks I used for the sessions in the yellow TLC classroom are not available online on the TechEd site, so you can download them from here as well.

The first session I presented was all around using the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 PowerToys. You can click on this link to download the slide deck. The sample code I showed you might be of interest when using the PowerToys, but you can also just simply use it to find out about performance on a particular device. The sample code is available through this link.

The second session I presented was a breakout session, which means the slide deck is on the TechEd site, so it won’t be available for download here. However, if you are interested in the demo code, including the unit test project inside the solution, you can download that sample code here.

Finally my last session was again a TLC session on the State & Notification Broker. The slide deck is available for download by clicking on this link. If you want to have the sample code as well, just click on this link.

I hope you had a great TechEd. Our next TechEd appointment will be in Los Angeles in May 2009.

First off I like to thank everybody who attended my session at TechEd yesterday on Unit Testing for Devices. I surely hope you had as much fun listening to me as I had presenting to you. I promised to follow up on one of the great questions that were asked during the session.

Can you run Smart Device Unit Tests from a command line?

Yesterday I was not 100% sure when answering this question, as I told everybody. To be complete certain, the best thing to do is just give it a try, so that is what I did. Here are my results, of course just for a very simple type library for which I created some unit tests.

Let me explain the steps you need to take in order to run your Smart Device Unit Tests from a command line.

• Open a Visual Studio 2008 command prompt. In this way you have all necessary environment variables setup correctly.
• Navigate to the directory where your unit test binaries are stored.
• Use mstest.exe to start your Unit Tests

You need to pass some specific parameters to mstest in order for Smart Device Unit tests to execute. It is mandatory to pass a runconfig option to specify a test run configuration file. The test run configuration file contains amongst others the target on which to run the tests. If you let Visual Studio 2008 create your unit tests, it will automatically generate a test run configuration file, that can be opened from inside Solution Explorer.

Inside the test run configuration file, you need to make sure that your Host is setup as Smart Device and that you are targeting the right platform and a particular device belonging to that platform.

The test run configuration file is stored in the root directory of your solution. For ease of use, I simply copied that particular file to the directory where my unit test binaries are stored. After this step I simply executed my unit tests from a command line, using the following command:

Mstest /runconfig:SmartDeviceTestRun.testrunConfig /Testcontainer:CalculatorLibTests.dll

Executing this command connects to the device that is specified in the test run configuration file. If the device is an emulator, the emulator will even be started for you. The tests will run on the device / emulator and the test results are returned to the development machine. You can specify a file to store the test results in, or simply show the results in the command prompt.

I will make sure to create a video in the very near future to show this in action. Just check out the Windows Mobile Development Center for availability of that video over the upcoming 3 to 6 weeks.

To begin with, I want to thank everybody who joined us today during our MSDN Webcast that came to you Live from Orlando. For me it was definitely thrilling to be able to co-present with Webcast rockstars like Constanze Roman and Jim Wilson, and actually be in the same room with these legends. As we promised during the webcast, we have some sample code available. I am pretty sure that Jim will make his sample code available through his blog. Constanze gave me permission to make her sample code available through my blog. If you joined us today, you probably will remember that Constanze showed us a little native application to record raw NMEA data. You can download that sample by clicking here, together with her upgraded version of her location aware application, including retrieving MapPoint maps. However, you need to get your own MapPoint developer account in order to run this sample. To obtain a MapPoint developer account you can click here. Finally, my source code, all about performance of .NET CF applications, can be downloaded here.

I feel sad that this webcast series is over right now. At the same time I feel priviledged that Constanze and Jim allowed me to be part of this webcast series. I surely hope they keep up the great work and come up with ideas for cool future Windows Mobile related webcasts. I definitely will sign up to listen to them. I hope you do as well!

I am pretty sure that everybody who frequently reads this blog must know that we are in the midst of presenting a webcast series around developing for Windows Mobile in preparation for Tech-Ed. Since we scheduled this webcast series at the latest moment possible, there has been some confustion about the number of episodes in the series, and for our upcoming last part, also about the technical level of the webcast and about the content of this particular webcast. Here are the things I know for sure today. Constanze, Jim and I will present together, live from Tech-Ed, on Wednesday June 4 at 10.00 AM PST. The intended duration of this webcast is one hour, but if you have attended previous webcasts from Jim and from me, you know they might run over at least 15 minutes. This time I know for a fact though that both Constanze and I will be running away from the webcast at 11.15 AM, if necessary leavning Jim all alone with all of you, since we both have Tech-Ed breakout sessions scheduled at 2.45 PM EST, which, after doing the math corresponds with 11.45 AM PST.

What I also know for a fact is that this is going to be the most 'improvising' Webcast I have ever (co-)presented. What I don't know yet is the location from where we will be presenting. Is it going to be a nice and quiet conference room with only the three of us present in the room? I hope it will be something different. I would really like to present from the exhibition floor at one of the booths, with many people attending us online, but also many people attending us in Orlando. It will be noisier that way, but definitely much more fun as well.

What I know for a fact as well is that the description of this webcast series is not entirely accurate. Don't get angry if some of the announced demos will not be shown, but entirely different demos instead.

What I definitely know for a fact is that this is going to be a fun webcast, hopefully not only for us presenting it, but also for you attending, be it live in Orlando or live somewhere else around the world. The only thing I will ask you at this moment is to please make sure to reserve your seats by clicking this link. As always, the number of seats is limited and I would hate it if you would not be able to join us, because of a sold out house.

Once again thank you all for attending our Webcast on Windows Mobile development just a few hours ago. As promised, you can download all sample code we showed during the webcast here. Just click on this link to download my sample code. This sample is partly inspired by the Windows Mobile LOB Accelerator 2008, a very cool example, shipping with complete source code + documentation. Using this sample, I had my own webcast sample up and running in just a few minutes, so you should take advantage of this great example as well.

Constanze was kind enough to make her sample code available as well. You can find her location awareness sample by clicking on this link. In order for both our samples to run properly, you need the Windows Mobile 6 Professional SDK installed on your development system.

Don't forget to join Jim Wilson tomorrow for the next part of our Webcast Series, where he is going to talk about Mobile Data Strategies and Synchronization. Your next appointment will be on May 28 at 10.00 PST. You can register here to attend this webcast live.

Finally, since there was some confusion about the exact number of webcasts in this series, there will be a part 5, being broadcasted live from TechEd. It looks like Jim, Constanze and I will meet there to all present a part of this webcast in which we will round up the series, definitely show some cool demos and talk about why like to develop applications for Windows Mobile Devices. Make sure to register for this last webcast which will air on Wednesday June 4, once again at 10.00 AM PST. One final note on our last webcast. It is currently listed on MSDN as a level 100 webcast. That is definitely not true, it will be at least a level 200 webcast.

First I like to thank all of you who attended one or both of my sessions at the Microsoft Netherlands DevDays yesterday. I know that the second session was sort of advanced, showing lots of code samples that you maybe did not completely get. The good news is that we are right now thinking about creating a whole series of webcasts, videos and whitepapers for beginning WM developers on MSDN. Just check out the blogs of my friends Constanze and Jim. I am sure that they will give you more information about this when it becomes available. I also promised all of you to make my sample code available. As a separate bonus, I will also provide links to download my slide decks for both presentations.

Download my first slide deck

Download my first sample application (+ a few more samples I didn't have time to talk about during the presentation).

Download my second slide deck

Download all sample code for the second talk

Remember, the "FeatureManager" I spoke about during the presentations is a work in progress. I will make more code available when I have it.

First I like to thank all of you who attended one or both of my sessions at the Microsoft Netherlands DevDays yesterday. I know that the second session was sort of advanced, showing lots of code samples that you maybe did not completely get. The good news is that we are right now thinking about creating a whole series of webcasts, videos and whitepapers for beginning WM developers on MSDN. Just check out the blogs of my friends Constanze and Jim. I am sure that they will give you more information about this when it becomes available. I also promised all of you to make my sample code available. As a separate bonus, I will also provide links to download my slide decks for both presentations.

Download my first slide deck

Download my first sample application (+ a few more samples I didn't have time to talk about during the presentation).

Download my second slide deck

Download all sample code for the second talk

Remember, the "FeatureManager" I spoke about during the presentations is a work in progress. I will make more code available when I have it.

I just found out that we have an opportunity meeting face to face if you are attending the Microsoft Netherlands DevDays this Friday. Unfortunately I will only be around on Friday, but I will deliver two different presentations on Friday. The first one is all about getting started developing Windows Mobile appilcations. Our appointment for this talk is at 9.15 AM in Room A of the RAI conference centre on the first floor. Our next appointment, when I will talk about advanced Windows Mobile application Development is in the same room, but at 3 PM. During the lunch break, between noon and 1.30 PM I will be around though to answer all your hard questions around Windows Mobile Development during the Sharing Visions (in other words 'Ask the Experts') session on the Ground Floor of the RAI conference centre near booth 2.09. I am looking forward to meeting many of you and being able to speak Dutch again for a while.

Right now we are having some issues with some servers that make it temporarily impossible for you to download the webcast Constanze and I presented last week. I can assure you that everybody is working hard to solve the issues. If you are experiencing problems right now viewing our webcast offline or downloading it, make sure to check back a few times. Hopefully the problem is solved by the end of the day. Once the servers are up and running again, you should be able to view the on-demand version of this first of a five part webcast series in preparation for TechEd here.

First let met thank everybody who attended our MSDN Webcast on Developing applications for Windows Mobile Devices. With such a late announcement of the series it was great to see so many of you shoing up. Also, let me thank everybody who helped us advertising this Webcast. Without your help we would not have that many people joining us live, so once again a big thank you. Finally, a special thank you to you, Constanze for letting me co-present with you!

If you are interested in today's sample code, you can download it here. Remember you need Visual Studio 2008 to open the sample code, play with it and modify it. 

Today was only the beginning of a 5 part series around Windows Mobile development to get you up to speed to get the most out of Tech*Ed. We started very simple, but in the upcoming parts of the series we will raise the bar. Our next appointment is Wednesday May 21st at 10.00 AM PST, when Jim Wilson will be talking about how to develop your first Real Windows Mobile 6 application. Here is Jim's abstract:

Developing Windows Mobile 6 applications with the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework allows you to take advantage of your existing desktop developer skills and enables you to begin developing mobile applications quickly. Although you may be familiar with many aspects of the .NET Compact Framework, mobile software development requires additional considerations such as designing a user interface for small displays, adapting the user interface to different device form factors, and avoiding unnecessary battery consumption. In this webcast, we address how you can handle these issues and demonstrate how you can test your application with the Windows Mobile Device Emulator before you deploy your application to the first device.

Make sure you register following this link, because seats are limited!

It looks like we are going to have lots of things going on in the upcoming weeks. We are not entirely sure of all details like registration links right now, but we will be presenting a whole bunch of webcastsover the upcoming weeks. It looks that we are having at least four more webcasts coming up to prepare you, as a Windows Mobile developer, ideally for TechEd. Of course, I would definitely like to invite everybody else, not just Windows Mobile developers, to attend our webcasts and our sessions at TechEd. Once you find out about our cool devices, either by Jim, Constanze, me or our other great speakers around Windows Mobile we have available for you at TechEd, I am sure you can't wait to develop your first application targetting these cool devices as well! And of course all of us will take booth duty time to talk one on one with you as well at TechEd! OK, time to focus. This is some very preliminary information, but it looks like our Webcast schedule to prepare ideally for TechEd to learn more about application development for Windows Mobile devices looks like this (and again, some details might still change and I inform you about registration links as soon as I have them):

Session 1 - May 16 presented by Constanze and Maarten at 11am PT - - Introduction to Windows Mobile Application Development

Session 2 - May 21, presented by Jim at 10am PT - May 16 - Developing your first real Windows Mobile 6 application

Session 3 -May 27, presented by Constanze and Maarten at 10am PT - Using Device Capabilities and Device Functionality

Session 4 - May 28, presentedy by Jim at 10am PT - Mobile Data Strageties: SQL Server Comact, XML, LINQ and Synchronization

This surely looks like an interesting series of webcasts. I hope may of you can join us live. Make sure to check our blogs! Constanze, Jim and myself will give you registration links on our blogs once we have them available.

It looks like we are going to have lots of things going on in the upcoming weeks. We are not entirely sure of all details like registration links right now, but we will be presenting a whole bunch of webcastsover the upcoming weeks. It looks that we are having at least four more webcasts coming up to prepare you, as a Windows Mobile developer, ideally for TechEd. Of course, I would definitely like to invite everybody else, not just Windows Mobile developers, to attend our webcasts and our sessions at TechEd. Once you find out about our cool devices, either by Jim, Constanze, me or our other great speakers around Windows Mobile we have available for you at TechEd, I am sure you can't wait to develop your first application targetting these cool devices as well! And of course all of us will take booth duty time to talk one on one with you as well at TechEd! OK, time to focus. This is some very preliminary information, but it looks like our Webcast schedule to prepare ideally for TechEd to learn more about application development for Windows Mobile devices looks like this (and again, some details might still change and I inform you about registration links as soon as I have them):

Session 1 - May 16 presented by Constanze and Maarten at 11am PT - - Introduction to Windows Mobile Application Development

Session 2 - May 21, presented by Jim at 10am PT - May 16 - Developing your first real Windows Mobile 6 application

Session 3 -May 27, presented by Constanze and Maarten at 10am PT - Using Device Capabilities and Device Functionality

Session 4 - May 28, presentedy by Jim at 10am PT - Mobile Data Strageties: SQL Server Comact, XML, LINQ and Synchronization

This surely looks like an interesting series of webcasts. I hope may of you can join us live. Make sure to check our blogs! Constanze, Jim and myself will give you registration links on our blogs once we have them available.

After wasting way too much time trying, feeling desperate, getting tons of grey hairs and interpreting a totally misleading error message, I finally got a VB.NET sample for my next How-Do-I video working. The fun started with getting access to command line parameters. My first stupid attempt was to simply pass the command line parameters to the constructor (or in VB.NET terminology, the New subroutine) without doing anything else. The error message I got from the compiler was at least interesting. It told me I had an error at line 0 in Form Designer auto generated code. Of course there is not even a line 0 in any file, because the source code editor starts counting with one. The message itself was pretty misleading as well, at least to me:

 Error 1'MainForm' is a type in 'MyApplication' and cannot be used as an expression

C:\HDI-CreateProcBasedSplashScr-VB\MyApplication\MainForm.Designer.vb         0              0

MyApplication

In C#, it is not that hard to process command line parameters. You simply modify the Main function in Program.cs. In VB.NET I did not even see a Program.vb file, so it took me a while to finally try and add an overloaded Main subroutine to my MainForm.vb class, just like this:

    Public Shared Sub main(ByVal args As String())

        Dim launchWindowName As String = String.Empty

        If (args.Count = 1) Then

            launchWindowName = args(0)

        End If

        Application.Run(New MainForm(launchWindowName))

    End Sub

That helped a lot! All my other challenges had to do with being unfamiliar with the syntax of VB.NET

At some point in my code I needed a switch statement, well, at least in C#. I had no clue how to do this in VB.NET. After a little research I found this wonderful website that saved my day. If you need to manually translate source code from C# to VB.NET, instead of using one of the great automatic translators, this VB.NET – C# comparison webpage might be your life saver as well.

All in all, it took me way too long to translate a little sample application from C# into VB.NET. At least now I know for sure! Even though I feel like a genius, I am simply not smart enough to start coding in VB.NET. I guess I will be stuck with C# forever.

The fact that you are looking at this Weblog entry makes it likely that you have heard about Windows CE. However, maybe you have never had the chance to play with this Operating System. Even though the development tools are not that expensive, the investment might be a little too much for students or hobbyist developers. And what if you have the tools available? Windows Embedded CE ships with a great emulator, but it is so much nicer to actually run your new OS Design on real target hardware. From now on you can do so, thanks to the SPARK Initiative. SPARK Your Imagination offers a kit that combines Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2, Visual Studio 2005 Professional, and an embedded device. Check it out and start developing those cool embedded systems powered by Windows Embedded CE.

It seems that the Windows Mobile Developer Center home page on MSDN is slowly but surely showing us more information and relevant links to developer articles, videos, webcasts and blog entries. This is a good think, so make sure to add it to your favorites. After all, you can’t read enough about developing for Windows Mobile devices, right?

The fact that you are looking at this Weblog entry makes it likely that you have heard about Windows CE. However, maybe you have never had the chance to play with this Operating System. Even though the development tools are not that expensive, the investment might be a little too much for students or hobbyist developers. And what if you have the tools available? Windows Embedded CE ships with a great emulator, but it is so much nicer to actually run your new OS Design on real target hardware. From now on you can do so, thanks to the SPARK Initiative. SPARK Your Imagination offers a kit that combines Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2, Visual Studio 2005 Professional, and an embedded device. Check it out and start developing those cool embedded systems powered by Windows Embedded CE.

It seems that the Windows Mobile Developer Center home page on MSDN is slowly but surely showing us more information and relevant links to developer articles, videos, webcasts and blog entries. This is a good think, so make sure to add it to your favorites. After all, you can’t read enough about developing for Windows Mobile devices, right?

Thank you all for attending our MSDN Webcast on Creating Location-Aware Applications for Windows Mobile Devices. If you were not able to attend, you can still take a look at the on-demand version of this webcast. As promised, the sample code that I used during the webcast is available for download. Hopefully this inspires you to create your own location aware applications for Windows Mobile Devices.

Even though I still have to present a webcast on location aware applications, I am already busy with flying to the US one more time. First off, getting some heat in Phoenix, AZ, but traveling onwards to rainy Seattle / Redmond on Sunday for the MVP Summit. To have at least have a next episode of my weekly column available by Sunday, I simply looked up some information about Windows CE at an online encyclopedia. You should definitely check my weekly column next week Sunday or Monday. I will not reveal anything else right now. However, I could not believe what I read. Hopefully this was an incident, but I will look for more articles I can judge, to simply verify the content of online encyclopedias. I might move back to those old fashioned written encyclopedias if I can't rely on the content of the online versions.

Thank you all for attending our MSDN Webcast on Creating Location-Aware Applications for Windows Mobile Devices. If you were not able to attend, you can still take a look at the on-demand version of this webcast. As promised, the sample code that I used during the webcast is available for download. Hopefully this inspires you to create your own location aware applications for Windows Mobile Devices.

Even though I still have to present a webcast on location aware applications, I am already busy with flying to the US one more time. First off, getting some heat in Phoenix, AZ, but traveling onwards to rainy Seattle / Redmond on Sunday for the MVP Summit. To have at least have a next episode of my weekly column available by Sunday, I simply looked up some information about Windows CE at an online encyclopedia. You should definitely check my weekly column next week Sunday or Monday. I will not reveal anything else right now. However, I could not believe what I read. Hopefully this was an incident, but I will look for more articles I can judge, to simply verify the content of online encyclopedias. I might move back to those old fashioned written encyclopedias if I can't rely on the content of the online versions.

Here is your first chance to take a good look at Windows Mobile 6.1 functionality. Brand new emulator images are available for download, allowing you to run your applications on a Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard or Professional device, well, at least on the emulator. You can use the emulators from inside Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, but they can also run stand-alone. With the 6.1 emulator images available, there is no reason not to start developing applications targetting Windows Mobile 6.1 devices. 

If you have a Windows Mobile device that has integrated GPS hardware, you can get much more out of your applications by making them location aware. If you want to know more about this, make sure to attend my MSDN Webcast this Wednesday at 11.00 AM PST. Here is the official description:

More and more Windows Mobile powered devices ship with integrated global positioning system (GPS) hardware. Since Windows Mobile devices are typically used on the road, it makes a lot of sense to add location awareness to your applications. In this MSDN webcast, Maarten Struys shows you how you can make use of the GPS Intermediate Driver to access GPS information from inside managed applications. Learn how to use the FakeGPS utility to test location-enabled applications without needing access to a physical GPS device. Of course, in this session, you also see a location-aware application on a device using real GPS data. 

Here is your first chance to take a good look at Windows Mobile 6.1 functionality. Brand new emulator images are available for download, allowing you to run your applications on a Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard or Professional device, well, at least on the emulator. You can use the emulators from inside Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, but they can also run stand-alone. With the 6.1 emulator images available, there is no reason not to start developing applications targetting Windows Mobile 6.1 devices. 

If you have a Windows Mobile device that has integrated GPS hardware, you can get much more out of your applications by making them location aware. If you want to know more about this, make sure to attend my MSDN Webcast this Wednesday at 11.00 AM PST. Here is the official description:

More and more Windows Mobile powered devices ship with integrated global positioning system (GPS) hardware. Since Windows Mobile devices are typically used on the road, it makes a lot of sense to add location awareness to your applications. In this MSDN webcast, Maarten Struys shows you how you can make use of the GPS Intermediate Driver to access GPS information from inside managed applications. Learn how to use the FakeGPS utility to test location-enabled applications without needing access to a physical GPS device. Of course, in this session, you also see a location-aware application on a device using real GPS data. 

If you want to take a look at previous presentations and webcasts I have presented, you can simply take a look at my MVP profile. I know that some folks of my own company are interested in this. The only content I have not listed here, since this would be way too much, are the 'How-Do-I" videos I have created over the last few months.

If you want to take a look at previous presentations and webcasts I have presented, you can simply take a look at my MVP profile. I know that some folks of my own company are interested in this. The only content I have not listed here, since this would be way too much, are the 'How-Do-I" videos I have created over the last few months.

The upcoming weeks promise to be very busy again. We are about to start the 2008 conference season, meaning lots of preparations for presentations and the possibility to earn lots of frequent flyer miles once again. My first stop will be Seatlle/Redmond between April 13 - April 18 for the MVP Summit. Next stop will be Amsterdam for the Microsoft Dutch DevDays on May 22, May 23 to deliver two presentations on Windows Mobile Application Development. Immediately afterwards, we have TechEd Orlando between June 3 - June 6 where I will present three different talks about Windows Mobile Application Developement. In between, on April 9 I will present an MSDN Webcast on Location Aware applications for Windows Mobile Devices. We are also still talking to AT&T to do more webcasts. Besides that, I also have an obligation to create a How-Do-I for Devices video every two weeks, with the upcoming 3 episodes all around creating splash screens. So it looks like the upcoming weeks are going to be very busy again. In between, I also have a Windows Embedded CE 6.0 training scheduled, a Windows Embedded Promotional event in Holland and last, but not least, judging the second round for the Windows Embedded track in the Imagine Cup. Besides that, I have to put in 40 hours / week for my company (PTS Software) as well. So if I am running a little late in answering emails, you just found out about my excuse. Honestly, there are so many more things I want to do. Why are there only 24 hours in one single day? With all technology available, we need to do something about that.

The upcoming weeks promise to be very busy again. We are about to start the 2008 conference season, meaning lots of preparations for presentations and the possibility to earn lots of frequent flyer miles once again. My first stop will be Seatlle/Redmond between April 13 - April 18 for the MVP Summit. Next stop will be Amsterdam for the Microsoft Dutch DevDays on May 22, May 23 to deliver two presentations on Windows Mobile Application Development. Immediately afterwards, we have TechEd Orlando between June 3 - June 6 where I will present three different talks about Windows Mobile Application Developement. In between, on April 9 I will present an MSDN Webcast on Location Aware applications for Windows Mobile Devices. We are also still talking to AT&T to do more webcasts. Besides that, I also have an obligation to create a How-Do-I for Devices video every two weeks, with the upcoming 3 episodes all around creating splash screens. So it looks like the upcoming weeks are going to be very busy again. In between, I also have a Windows Embedded CE 6.0 training scheduled, a Windows Embedded Promotional event in Holland and last, but not least, judging the second round for the Windows Embedded track in the Imagine Cup. Besides that, I have to put in 40 hours / week for my company (PTS Software) as well. So if I am running a little late in answering emails, you just found out about my excuse. Honestly, there are so many more things I want to do. Why are there only 24 hours in one single day? With all technology available, we need to do something about that.

If you are interested in developing Windows Mobile LOB applications, you should definitely check this out. Microsoft has created a Windows Mobile Line of Business Accelerator, a sample LOB application that is created with Visual Studio 2008.This very cool sample application comes with source code and gives you lots of inside information about the latest technologies that are availabe to create occasionally connected applications for smart devices. The sample application comes with full source code and is fully functional. Just to get you excited, here is a sample screen shot (it may look simple, but hey, this will run on any Windows Mobile device).

Here is also an impression of the code, including tons of inline documentation:

If you are serious about developing Windows Mobile LOB applications, make sure to download this sample and use it as your headstart.

Making a shameless plug, here are some of the features that this LOB Accelerator has in stock for you.

Delivering new innovations and development best practices to the Windows Mobile platform with Visual Studio 2008, the .NET Compact Framework 3.5, SQL Server Compact 3.5, a working Supply Chain application, over 5,000 lines of commented code plus over a hundred pages of helpful documentation.
Adapt your App :: Create a single binary that runs unchanged on Windows Mobile Standard or Pro, Portrait or Landscape, Rectangle or Square. No more wasting time building separate executables to accommodate different screen sizes or input methods.
Sync Services for ADO.NET :: Synchronize your data between SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server Compact 3.5 using the new Sync Framework. Keep all your occasionally-connected mobile workers on the same page.
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Store and Forward ::Reliably push messages to servers or other devices via Exchange Server 2007. Programmatically notify peer devices that they have new orders waiting for them and need to sync.
MapPoint :: Guide delivery drivers to their customers via either the shortest or quickest route. Integrated mapping means you’ll never get lost again.
LINQ :: Use the new Language Integrated Query to filter results from Generic Object Collections. Query both your objects and XML using a familiar, SQL-like syntax to boost developer productivity.
Custom Controls :: Capture signatures and dazzle your end-users with 3D and Alpha-blended controls that alter their behavior depending on the platform they’re running on.
Managed Stored Procedures and Triggers :: The pluggable data layer allows you to say goodbye to compiling Dynamic SQL inside your code and fires events to react to INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations.
Notifications and Online Help :: Formerly only supported on Pro, say hello to Popup Notifications and Online Help on Standard. Popup Notifications, also known as “toast,” display an HTML message and then disappear after a pre-determined amount of time. Using Online Help on every screen reduces your applicationtraining costs.
Language Switching and Localization :: Change Language/Regional Settings inside your app and watch text and Online Help speak a different language. Don’t wait until your application is finished to realize that it needs to be world-ready.
Time to Market :: Stop reinventing the wheel and use this Accelerator as the foundation for your next Windows Mobile development effort. If you don’t want to use the whole thing, pick and choose the components that are the best fit for your project.

Thank's, Constanze, for passing this info to me.

Last week during the IT HerOlympics in Nieuwegein, Netherlands, we had a great audience during the Windows Mobile Sessions. It was quite interesting to see that many attendees did not consider themselves experienced application developers for Windows Mobile devices, so I guess we had lots of potential great developers in the audience. All in all, the whole IT HerOlympics event was well organized and a pleasure to attend. In my opinion it is great to have an official launch of a number of important new products, amongst with Visual Studio 2008, accompanied with a number of technical presentations on how to use those new products. Last week I promised to make the sample code for my two talks available, so here they are. The first sample is very simple, containing a calculator class that can be used to experiment with Unit Testing for Devices. The second example is a little more complicated, since it uses both SQL Server Compact 3.5, LINQ for Devices and some other new things. During both presentations I also introduced the audience to the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Power Toys. This collection of diagnostic tools is really priceless for everybody that wants to create the most performant managed applications for Windows Mobile devices.

Download the Unit Tests for Devices Chalk Talk Sample code.

Download the Windows Mobile Application Development Sample code.

Get the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Power Toys.

This was my first experience, speaking at a local Microsoft Netherlands event. Without any doubts I can say that I had a great time, being part of the IT HerOlympics, and I can't wait for the Microsoft Netherlands DevDays to start. Looking at the speaker list, we will meet again, that is, if you will join me again, I am already scheduled.

Last week during the IT HerOlympics in Nieuwegein, Netherlands, we had a great audience during the Windows Mobile Sessions. It was quite interesting to see that many attendees did not consider themselves experienced application developers for Windows Mobile devices, so I guess we had lots of potential great developers in the audience. All in all, the whole IT HerOlympics event was well organized and a pleasure to attend. In my opinion it is great to have an official launch of a number of important new products, amongst with Visual Studio 2008, accompanied with a number of technical presentations on how to use those new products. Last week I promised to make the sample code for my two talks available, so here they are. The first sample is very simple, containing a calculator class that can be used to experiment with Unit Testing for Devices. The second example is a little more complicated, since it uses both SQL Server Compact 3.5, LINQ for Devices and some other new things. During both presentations I also introduced the audience to the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Power Toys. This collection of diagnostic tools is really priceless for everybody that wants to create the most performant managed applications for Windows Mobile devices.

Download the Unit Tests for Devices Chalk Talk Sample code.

Download the Windows Mobile Application Development Sample code.

Get the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Power Toys.

This was my first experience, speaking at a local Microsoft Netherlands event. Without any doubts I can say that I had a great time, being part of the IT HerOlympics, and I can't wait for the Microsoft Netherlands DevDays to start. Looking at the speaker list, we will meet again, that is, if you will join me again, I am already scheduled.

It is sort of interesting that my friend Constanze had to blog about this first (and you should check out her blog to find tons of interesting things about Windows Mobile Devices and Windows Mobile Device application development). Anyway, we have just published a brand new video that explains the impact of finalizers on your Windows Mobile Managed applications. Make sure to watch this video and hopefully you get the message that Disposing of objects that have that functionality enabled makes sense. If you want to study the behavior of your own managed types, make also sure to download the .NET CF 3.5 Power Toys to get tools to help you analyze finalization issues.

Are you developing managed smart device applications that make use of multiple threads? Have you ever noticed unexpected behavior in such applications when trying to update user interface controls on a thread that did not create the UI control? Have you maybe even experienced deadlock situations when you are trying to update UI controls using the Control.Invoke method? To solve this mystery, we have just published the following how-to video to properly update UI Controls in multithreaded applications. Even though you might think that this information is not relevant for you, you might think twice. Guess what happens if you create a timer object from the System.Threading namespace. Well, in fact, your timer method will run on a separate thread, meaning you will have to pay special attention on updating UI controls on your timer method. So make sure to don't miss this video.

The last few months have been extremely busy with no time to blog or even write a weekly column about Windows Mobile Development, but hopefully this will change for the better starting now. Traditionally, January and February are typical months to think about abstracts for presentations, make plans for the upcoming year and get some 'real' work done as well. Well, planning for Tech*Ed USA is done, and for the first time ever I feel very excited to present a few sessions at some local Dutch Microsoft events as well. First off, this Thursday I will be part of the IT-HerOlympics in Nieuwegein - Netherlands to deliver two sessions about Windows Mobile Development using Visual Studio 2008. Also, we have a great line up at the Dutch Microsoft DevDays on May 22 and May 23, where I will speak about Windows Mobile development too. During this event, we have some great international speakers attending as well. I do believe this is the first time ever we will have sessions around Windows Embedded Operating Systems and around Windows Mobile, so this is a real breakthrough. I will give you more information as soon as it is available. Many, many things have happened over the last few months. Please check out Jim WIlson's and my How-To video series for devices. If you want to meet us together in person, your best option so far will be Tech-Ed Developer 2008 in Orlando. I will give three different, Windows Mobile related presentations at this biggest Microsoft Developer Conference, but I am also pretty sure that Jim is going to be there as well. We also presented a MSDN webcasts series around Visual Studio 2008 for Device Developers, with Jim's latest contribution around LINQ for Devices. Hopefully before Tech*Ed, although no official announcement yet, my good friend Constanze Kratel, myself and maybe some other folks will create a whitepaper / video / demo / webcast / Tech*Ed (?????) presentation around creating Windows Mobile Line-of-Business applications, specifically targetting Windows Mobile 6 devices and Visual Studio 2008. Hopefully we have more announcements pretty soon. Check out Constanze's blog or mine frequently for more news around this latest initiative to make you better and more productive Windows Mobile Developers. 

It has been quiet for a while on DotNETForDevices. As always there was this perfect excuse of being way too busy. Last week for instance I was in Poland to teach a Windows Mobile training to a bright group of very cool developers. However, all traveling is done for at least a whole whopping three weeks right now. So hopefully I have some time to update this website. Something I wanted to do for a long time is recording a number of videos, targeting Windows Mobile application developers. Thanks to Jim Wilson and the excellent production staff at DTS I just got the chance to participate in the ‘How-do-I’ video series for device developers. Jim  has created lots of these videos in the last couple of months. Right now I am joining him for the upcoming videos. One week you will see a video created by Jim, the other week one by me, covering different topics, but they all have to do with developing applications in managed code for Windows Mobile devices. Since Visual Studio 2008 is released, I will use this brand new development environment to show you a couple of things around developing smart device applications. The cool thing about these videos is that they are limited to one single topic and that we show you how to create a number of applications or use cool features of the .NET Compact Framework from scratch, with easy ways for you to reproduce our code or make use of the downloadable source code in each and every video. However, since we will only cover managed applications with this video series, and since I am totally inspired by the Windows Mobile training I taught last week around native development, I thought it would be cool to create a number of videos around native application development for Windows Mobile devices as well. Just give me one or two weeks and the first video will appear on DotNETForDevices. Last thing I need to say about this topic. Thank you very much, my good friends at TechSmith for allowing me to use your great products to produce these videos. Hopefully you will visit them as well whenever you need to produce videos for either developer education or maybe to just create wonderful help content for the end users of your applications.

If you want to hear me speak immediately after traveling for over 15 hours from Phoenix via Los Angeles and Paris to Amsterdam, you have to join us on Thursday November 15 for part two of our Visual Studio 2008 webcast series for Windows Mobile Device Developers. If I can keep my eyes open, we will talk about Device Emulator 3.0 in this particular webcast. You will find out about using Device Emulator to test your applications for multiple form factors. You will also learn how to control Device Emulator Peripherals, how to programmatically control Device Emulator Manager and how to configure Emulator Instances. Just follow the links to sign up for individual Webcasts.

·         15-November-2007: What's New for Device Developers in Device Emulator 3.0

·         12-December-2007: Windows Communications Framework and mobile devices

·         09-January-2008: Unit Testing for Devices

·         13-February-2008: Language Integrated Query ( LINQ ) for Devices

Hopefully you will be able to join us during each of these Webcasts. To make the story complete, Jim Wilson is presenting the December and February Webcast, I’ll take care of the November and the January Webcasts.

Thanks to everyone who attended either of my sessions at Mobile Connections. There have been a few changes in some slides and some of the samples. If you are interested in the latest versions of the decks and the sample code, you can download them here.

1.       WMM306 - Programming with State & Notification Broker in Windows Mobile 6

·         Download Slide Deck

·         Download Sample Code

2.       WMW311 – Testing, Debugging and Diagnosing Mobile Applications with Visual Studio 2008

·         Download Slide Deck

·         Download Sample Code

3.       WMW409 – Incorporating COM Objects into your .NET Compact Framework Application

·         Download Slide Deck

·         Download Sample Code

4.       WMW410 - .NET Compact Framework Asynchronous Programming Techniques

·         Download Slide Deck

·         Download Sample Code

If you want to hear me speak immediately after traveling for over 15 hours from Phoenix via Los Angeles and Paris to Amsterdam, you have to join us on Thursday November 15 for part two of our Visual Studio 2008 webcast series for Windows Mobile Device Developers. If I can keep my eyes open, we will talk about Device Emulator 3.0 in this particular webcast. You will find out about using Device Emulator to test your applications for multiple form factors. You will also learn how to control Device Emulator Peripherals, how to programmatically control Device Emulator Manager and how to configure Emulator Instances. Just follow the links to sign up for individual Webcasts.

·         15-November-2007: What's New for Device Developers in Device Emulator 3.0

·         12-December-2007: Windows Communications Framework and mobile devices

·         09-January-2008: Unit Testing for Devices

·         13-February-2008: Language Integrated Query ( LINQ ) for Devices

Hopefully you will be able to join us during each of these Webcasts. To make the story complete, Jim Wilson is presenting the December and February Webcast, I’ll take care of the November and the January Webcasts.

Thanks to everyone who attended either of my sessions at Mobile Connections. There have been a few changes in some slides and some of the samples. If you are interested in the latest versions of the decks and the sample code, you can download them here.

1.       WMM306 - Programming with State & Notification Broker in Windows Mobile 6

·         Download Slide Deck

·         Download Sample Code

2.       WMW311 – Testing, Debugging and Diagnosing Mobile Applications with Visual Studio 2008

·         Download Slide Deck

·         Download Sample Code

3.       WMW409 – Incorporating COM Objects into your .NET Compact Framework Application

·         Download Slide Deck

·         Download Sample Code

4.       WMW410 - .NET Compact Framework Asynchronous Programming Techniques

·         Download Slide Deck

·         Download Sample Code

Did you ever want to participate in a launch event of a great new Operating System? Here is your chance! On November 15 you can join Kevin Dallas when he is going to unveil the latest version of the Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Operating System, called Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2. If you don't want to travel to Yokohama, Japan to meet Kevin live, you can still attend the launch event by registering online, since we are making this launch event available as a webcast. I, for one person, will attend the virtual launch event. Not only because Amsterdam is far away from Yokohama, but also because I will present yet another webcast on that same date around Device Emulator 3.0. If you are in the Pacific Time Zone, you probably want to block the entire morning of November 15 in your schedule. First to meet Kevin at 9 PST, immediately followed by my webcast at 11 PST. Here are the links to sign up for both events:

Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Launch Event

MSDN Webcast covering Device Emulator 3.0

In part two of our five part series around Visual Studio 2008 for Device Developers you have to stick with me. Even though both Jim and I really enjoyed presenting together, we will from now on cover one particular topic around Visual Studio 2008 for Device Developers individually. You can attend the next episode of this series live on November 15, 2007 at 11.00 PST. Please not that this Mobility Webcast will be aired on Thursday instead of Wednesday. I don't even want to talk about it, but I will be flying home from the Mobile Connections Conference on November 14. Since there is not yet any possibility to present a live MSDN Webcast in the air at an altitude of 33.000 feet, we had to delay this particular webcast for one day. However, this is an unique opportunity for everybody to listen to me at a time that I will be very tired. I am flying from Phoenix via Los Angeles and Paris back to Amsterdam. The journey starts on November 14 at around noon PST and ends on November 15, again around noon CET. Since I usually don't sleep on airplanes and this is a long flight, I'll probably be awake for some 36 hours when we begin the Webcast. A perfect chance to see me trying to get Device Emulator 3.0 working, although I promise I will run on a faster machine, compared to the one I used during yesterday's webcast.

Here is the abstract for the November 15 webcast:

With the new version of the Microsoft Visual Studio development system, device developers can make use of the many new features to develop applications for Windows Mobile powered devices. In this webcast, learn about the new enhancements to Device Emulator 3.0. See how the Device Emulator allows you to target multiple devices with different form factors during testing of your application. We also show you how to configure the Device Emulator using the Device Emulator Manager to meet your specific device requirements. Finally you will find out how to customize your own emulators and how you can programmatically control emulators. Please join us to learn everything you want to know about Device Emulator 3.0.

Make sure to sign up in advance and reserve your seat here!

The other webcasts in this series around Visual Studio 2008 will cover the following topics:

• Windows Communications Framework and mobile devices on December 12, 2007 at 11.00 PST
• Unit Testing for Devices on January 9, 2008 at 11.00 PST
• LINQ for Mobile Devices on February 13, 2008 at 11.00 PST.

Jim will be your presenter on WCF and LINQ, I will talk you through DE 3.0 and Unit Testing. I really hope that we get a great number of attendees for each of these webcasts, just like we had during our Introduction of Visual Studio 2008 for Device Developers on October 10.

Did you ever want to participate in a launch event of a great new Operating System? Here is your chance! On November 15 you can join Kevin Dallas when he is going to unveil the latest version of the Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Operating System, called Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2. If you don't want to travel to Yokohama, Japan to meet Kevin live, you can still attend the launch event by registering online, since we are making this launch event available as a webcast. I, for one person, will attend the virtual launch event. Not only because Amsterdam is far away from Yokohama, but also because I will present yet another webcast on that same date around Device Emulator 3.0. If you are in the Pacific Time Zone, you probably want to block the entire morning of November 15 in your schedule. First to meet Kevin at 9 PST, immediately followed by my webcast at 11 PST. Here are the links to sign up for both events:

Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Launch Event

MSDN Webcast covering Device Emulator 3.0

In part two of our five part series around Visual Studio 2008 for Device Developers you have to stick with me. Even though both Jim and I really enjoyed presenting together, we will from now on cover one particular topic around Visual Studio 2008 for Device Developers individually. You can attend the next episode of this series live on November 15, 2007 at 11.00 PST. Please not that this Mobility Webcast will be aired on Thursday instead of Wednesday. I don't even want to talk about it, but I will be flying home from the Mobile Connections Conference on November 14. Since there is not yet any possibility to present a live MSDN Webcast in the air at an altitude of 33.000 feet, we had to delay this particular webcast for one day. However, this is an unique opportunity for everybody to listen to me at a time that I will be very tired. I am flying from Phoenix via Los Angeles and Paris back to Amsterdam. The journey starts on November 14 at around noon PST and ends on November 15, again around noon CET. Since I usually don't sleep on airplanes and this is a long flight, I'll probably be awake for some 36 hours when we begin the Webcast. A perfect chance to see me trying to get Device Emulator 3.0 working, although I promise I will run on a faster machine, compared to the one I used during yesterday's webcast.

Here is the abstract for the November 15 webcast:

With the new version of the Microsoft Visual Studio development system, device developers can make use of the many new features to develop applications for Windows Mobile powered devices. In this webcast, learn about the new enhancements to Device Emulator 3.0. See how the Device Emulator allows you to target multiple devices with different form factors during testing of your application. We also show you how to configure the Device Emulator using the Device Emulator Manager to meet your specific device requirements. Finally you will find out how to customize your own emulators and how you can programmatically control emulators. Please join us to learn everything you want to know about Device Emulator 3.0.

Make sure to sign up in advance and reserve your seat here!

The other webcasts in this series around Visual Studio 2008 will cover the following topics:

• Windows Communications Framework and mobile devices on December 12, 2007 at 11.00 PST
• Unit Testing for Devices on January 9, 2008 at 11.00 PST
• LINQ for Mobile Devices on February 13, 2008 at 11.00 PST.

Jim will be your presenter on WCF and LINQ, I will talk you through DE 3.0 and Unit Testing. I really hope that we get a great number of attendees for each of these webcasts, just like we had during our Introduction of Visual Studio 2008 for Device Developers on October 10.

Thanks to everybody who attended our webcast today. Hopefully you are as excited as we are with the new features that device developers will get with Visual Studio 2008. If you did not have the opportunity to join us live, you will be able to still watch it on-demand or download the entire webcast. You can download the demo code for Unit Testing and CLR Profiling here. If you want the LINQ sample code, you can download it from Jim's blog.

In order to run the demo code, you need to have Visual Studio 2008 installed on your machine. You can either download a VPC image containing Visual Studio 2008 beta 2, or download Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 to install it on your own machine.

If you want to take a look at the CLR Profiler, you also need to download and install the .NET CF 3.5 Power Tools.

Finally, if you want to target Windows Mobile 6 devices you need to download and install the Windows Mobile 6 Professional SDK and / or the Windows Mobile 6 Standard SDK.

Remember that this was just the first of a five part webcast series around Visual Studio 2008. Each of the upcoming months we will cover a particular topic and talk about it in detail. Here is the schedule:

• What's new for device developers in Device Emulator 3.0 on November 15, 2007 at 11.00 PST
• Windows Communications Framework and mobile devices on December 12, 2007 at 11.00 PST
• Unit Testing for Devices on January 9, 2008 at 11.00 PST
• LINQ for Mobile Devices on February 13, 2008 at 11.00 PST.

Jim will be your presenter on WCF and LINQ, I will talk you through DE 3.0 and Unit Testing. Please share this information with all your friends, co-workers and everybody else you think needs to know about device development. Hopefully we will meet you again during these upcoming webcasts.

If you want to learn more about Visual Studio 2008 and if you want to find out how Jim Wilson and I will be co presenting a MSDN Webcast, even though we are physically around 4500 miles apart from each other, you should definitely join us for the first part of a five part Webcast series around developing Windows Mobile applications using Visual Studio 2008. The first part of this series is a high level introduction of Visual Studio 2008. After this introduction you can join us separately to learn more about the following topics:

• LINQ (too hard of a topic for me, so Jim will present this one)
• Device Emulator 3.0 (ah well, I already did a couple of sessions at conferences around DE 3.0, so this is on I will present)
• WCF for Windows Mobile Devices (something I would love to know more about, but Jim definitely knows more about WCF than I, so guess who will be presenting this episode)
• Unit Testing for Devices (ok, I will talk about this very cool topic at several conferences around the world and hey, I believe in Unit Tests, so you have to deal with me during this episode).

The order in which we will present the 4 remaining episodes will be published soon on MSDN. Right now the most important thing for you to remember is to meet either Jim or I between October 2007 and February 2008, one Webcast / month, to get you started using Visual Studio 2008 to get allow you to build the best ever applications for Windows Mobile devices. Hopefully lots of you will register to join us for our first Webcast around Visual Studio 2008 on October 10! At the same time, I really hope that we get your attention to join us during the remaining 4 parts of this Webcast series as well. Please share this information with anyone you might think would be interested in developing software for Windows Mobile Devices using Visual Studio 2008. Let's try to fill the LiveMeeting Room with at least 500 attendees, OK?

First I want to thank everybody who joined me during the live MSDN Webcast around Improving Application Performance using Diagnostic Tools in the .NET Compact Framework. Also I want to welcome everybody who listened to the on-demand recording of this Webcast. Even though we only had one hour to discuss the tools, I hope you appreciate the tools we introduced and that you will start using both Remote Performance Monitor and the CLR Profiler. At days like this, when I am struggling to finish the Webcast more or less in time I really wish there would be a chance for us to discuss some topics much more in depth. I am pretty sure I could have talked at least 4 hours just about performance topics for managed applications and about the tools we provide to help you find your performance bottlenecks. So here is my promise to everybody. I will try to find out if we can run a series around this topic or perhaps schedule a Webcast later this year that runs for more than one hour. Some folks asked me already to provide some sample code. I guess it doesn't make sense for you to have all sample code that I showed in this Webcast, but you can find the little sample application that I used to show you how to measure performance on a particular device here.

This sample application simply measures how long it takes to call a method on an object and how long it takes to call a virtual method. Also it shows you the difference between accessing instance variables on a type directly versus using properties or even virtual properties. Running the sample application you will get a feeling how expensive P/Invoking will be on your particular target device and you will find out about the difference between using String or StringBuilder. If you take a look at this application's source code, you will see that this application is easy to modify or extend to measure performance in some specific areas you might be interested in.

Even though we have some great tools to study memory allocation in managed applications, like CLR Profiler (which comes with Visual Studio 2008) and Remote Performance Monitor, I can imagine that you want to know more about typical performance issues you might have with your application. That is where the little sample application you can download might be of assistance to you.

A bit off topic and yet still talking about Webcasts. When writing this down I even realize that we have not even submitted abstracts for this upcoming series, but I am pretty sure we will get these Webcasts to you. My good friend Jim Wilson and I will help you getting the most out of the new features that Visual Studio 2008 brings to you as a device developer. The dates have not been set yet, we still have to write abstracts for each and every Webcast, but, as an early announcement, here are the things we like to discuss with you. During the September 07 - January 08 time frame we are planning these Webcasts around Visual Studio 2008:

September 07 - A high level introduction of Visual Studio 2008 for device developers. This is going to be a unique chance to hear Jim and I co-hosting a Webcast.

October 07 - What's new in Device Emulator 3.0, you have to stick with me for this one.

November 07 - Windows Communication Foundation on Windows Mobile Devices. Since this is a much harder topic to cover, Jim volunteered to present this one.

December 07 - Unit Testing on Windows Mobile Devices. This is something available out of the box, so simple enough for me to present

January 08 - LINQ or Language INtegrated Queries if you wish. Again, a tough topic so we leave that with Jim.

Of course, this is still very early information about upcoming Webcasts. The topics might change and the actual dates might change. Just check out the MSDN Interactive Webcast Calendar to learn more about the exact dates and times of this Webcast Series. However, I wanted to make sure that you know about things coming up during the second half of this year. If there are topics around Visual Studio 2008 that you are missing or that you want to hear more about, please don't hesitate to send me an email. After all, we are still in the planning phase of these Webcasts and we want to make sure that everybody gets the most out of these Webcasts. Hey, if you have cool idea's we might even extend the series further so please, overflow my Inbox with suggestions.

This seems like a weird title but from my point of view it is not. Yesterday we finished the MEDC tour around the world. Even though I was only part of MEDC Las Vegas and MEDC Europe it was absolutely fantastic to be part of these events. Personal highlights for me were the amount of attendees joining my asynchronous talk at MEDC Las Vegas, over 150 attendees. Another highlight was the packed room at MEDC Europe when we were discussing how to build Windows Mobile® Applications that Seamlessly Run on Any Device. Speaking in a packed room is of course every presenter's dream. It was also very, very cool to be able to meet people in person who only knew me from MSDN Webcasts so far. On the downside, it seems that ILL203, the instructor led lab titled "Introduction to Building Line-Of-Business (LOB) Applications on Windows Mobile®" was doomed. At MEDC Las Vegas, Jim Wilson, who created this ILL, could only start the lab after a significant delay because the instructor PC was not working properly. In order to overcome this problem I at least made sure a dozen times that the presenter machine was working in Berlin. Well, it did work, but 10 minutes before starting the session I found out that we did not have lab manuals for the attendees. Thank goodness I brought my own lab manual, otherwise we probably had no alternative than cancelling the session. As it turned out, we worked through a big part of the lab, although I had to slow down quite a bit, not only explaining folks what we were doing, but also typing really, really slowly to give everybody a chance to keep up with the lab. Besides that, my 5 talks at MEDC Europe went fine, except for one other little incident. While talking about Windows Live Services on Windows Mobile Devices, I lost my Internet connection in the last quarter of the presentation. Normally that would not hurt me at all, but this time, talking about Live Services, being connected was essential. Unfortunately, everybody who joined me during this talk, missed the demonstration of "Live Search for mobile". If you are still interested in this great smart client application, simply browse to this url on your mobile device: http://wls.live.com, install the software and simply be blown away. The rest of my talks didn't rely on either print-outs of manuals or Internet connectivity, so all demos, even the Orcas demos, simply worked.

OK, you might now wonder what this has to do with Starbucks. Well, the fact that I was so awake and being able to talk, even during early morning sessions at MEDC Europe, was because there were enough Starbucks in Berlin to get me the tripple espresso I need to get started. I also noticed that many folks asked about the first Starbucks in Holland open to the general public. I knew it was somewhere at Schiphol Airport but while traveling to Berlin I finaly found it. If you are at Schiphol Airport and if you are in the A .. D gate area, you will find it. This area is mainly used for European flights. I will use these pictures as proof. Just look between the D and the C gate and you find the first Dutch Starbucks open for everybody.

Since I am usually taking Inter Continental flights there is only one wish for me, and I am sure for many other folks. There should be a second Starbucks at Schiphol Airport for folks departing from the E .. G gates. I have not spotted one there, but in August I will fly back to the US, hopefully I will find one then in that area as well.

MEDC Europe is almost here. I guess we are all ready to fly to Berlin and give each and every attendee the most out of this conference. It is a little after midnight here right now on Saturday June 23th and finally all my demos are done. The only thing I am hoping for right now is that the demo gods are with me and that I can show all folks attending my sessions some cool demos, some of which we didn't even show at MEDC USA. Especially around Windows Live Services on Mobile Devices and around Device Emulator 3.0 there is some cool stuff to watch. Well, actually, that is true for my talk on Building Windows Mobile© Applications that Seamlessly Run on Any Device as well.

In the device emulator session I will focus on using different emulators to test your applications on lots of devices, but also on new Visual Studio 2008 features for Device Emulator 3.0. You will learn how to configure and start emulators, and the Cellular Emulator will be completely demystified for you.

In the running on any device talk we will show you how to create applications that can run on any device as the title suggests, but also how you can get the most out of specific features for particular devices, yet creating maintainable code.

And the Windows Live Services talk will have lots of demo's, explaining you how to deal with RSS feeds, how to use URL encoding and how to create a mashup, first showing the original demo Jim Wilson and I ended with during our Windows Live on Windows Mobile Devices webcast series, but also showing you how the Windows Live Team created a Live Search version for Windows Mobile (and, if you attend my presentation you have to admit that they used some of our initial webcast idea's).

Anyway, the demo's are done, the talks are prepared, so there is no excuse anymore. Hopefully I will meet many folks at MEDC Europe. The conference will be a blast and you have tons of opportunities to talk one on one, not only with me, but also with the great rockstar speakers that will be presenting during MEDC Europe.

Oh, for those who are attending, but really for everybody, I'll publish the sample code on my blog right after the conference.

With Windows Embedded CE 6.0 it is possible to create an OS Design that targets multiple Board Support Packages. You might wonder when this comes handy. Take for instance this scenario. I am developing an OS Design for the eBox 2300. During my initial tests I am only interested to verify that I have all the functionality I need in my OS Design. In those cases it is very handy to target a second BSP, in this case the emulator. When building the OS Design you simply specify for which target you are building, initially in my case that will be the emulator. To test the OS Design I simply boot it into the emulator, not having to worry about connecting to the target, but simply using DMA transport to download the image to the emulator. Once I am happy with my OS Design I start building it for the actual hardware. As an added advantage, you can start creating your OS Design prior to having hardware available. Simply target the emulator initially and add the BSP for your target hardware to your OS design once your hardware and BSP are available.

Let me begin with thanking everybody who attended my session around diagnostic tools in the Compact Framework. If you were not able to attend there is a second chance. Make sure to sign up for our upcoming MSDN Webcast around the same topic. The other thing I want to mention here is that Tech Ed is not only a great conference to learn about existing and cool new Microsoft technologies. Tech Ed is also the place to make new friends. This was definitely true for me this year. As an example, I had a great meeting with Mick Lohan. Mick is from Ireland and I am sure I will be in touch with him again in the future. Gosh, I even went the extra mile and wrote a Windows Mobile application especially for Mick. If you want to have proof about this cool application, just check out Mick's blog.

With Windows Embedded CE 6.0 it is possible to create an OS Design that targets multiple Board Support Packages. You might wonder when this comes handy. Take for instance this scenario. I am developing an OS Design for the eBox 2300. During my initial tests I am only interested to verify that I have all the functionality I need in my OS Design. In those cases it is very handy to target a second BSP, in this case the emulator. When building the OS Design you simply specify for which target you are building, initially in my case that will be the emulator. To test the OS Design I simply boot it into the emulator, not having to worry about connecting to the target, but simply using DMA transport to download the image to the emulator. Once I am happy with my OS Design I start building it for the actual hardware. As an added advantage, you can start creating your OS Design prior to having hardware available. Simply target the emulator initially and add the BSP for your target hardware to your OS design once your hardware and BSP are available.

Let me begin with thanking everybody who attended my session around diagnostic tools in the Compact Framework. If you were not able to attend there is a second chance. Make sure to sign up for our upcoming MSDN Webcast around the same topic. The other thing I want to mention here is that Tech Ed is not only a great conference to learn about existing and cool new Microsoft technologies. Tech Ed is also the place to make new friends. This was definitely true for me this year. As an example, I had a great meeting with Mick Lohan. Mick is from Ireland and I am sure I will be in touch with him again in the future. Gosh, I even went the extra mile and wrote a Windows Mobile application especially for Mick. If you want to have proof about this cool application, just check out Mick's blog.

I wonder how I could have missed this. I have been waiting a while for this article to be publihsed. All of a sudden it is available on MSDN. If you want to know everything there is to know to write .NET Compact Framework 2.0 applications that are compatible with .NET Compact Framework 1.0 applications you should check out this article. It might give you some great ideas about maintaining one single code base while targetting two different versions of the .NET Compact Framework

There is not too much to tell for me about the second day at MEDC. My talk about asynchronous programming techniques was scheduled at 3.45 PM, so I basically spent all day rehearsing until that time. The presentation went fine. My biggest concern was running out of time, but I managed to cover all content in exactly 75 minutes, well perhaps I rushed over the last topic a little bit. Looking at the feedback, but also at the reactions of the attendees during the talk, I have the feeling that most of the people in the room were pleased with that talk. I am thinking about rerunning it as a webcast. One of the interesting feedback items was that some attendees want a more advanced multithreading talk. I guess this will not happen this year, but I have heard your comments and hey, next year there is another MEDC. Perhaps at that time we should schedule a level 400 session about multithreading and also incorporate the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 in that talk. In case you are interested, you can download the samples of this talk.

This week MEDC, the Windows Mobile and Embedded Developer Conference is held in Las Vegas. With around 1500 attendees joining us here, this is going to be a great event. So far we already had the keynote session by Robbie Bach. In a great attempt to highlight different form factors that Windows Mobile developers have to deal with, he introduced the "O-Phone", a device with a round form factor. In fact, this of course was a joke, but one that was done very well. The device was shown on a video which I hopefully can get my hands on at some time. You can read the script of Robbie's keynote here. If you want to hear Robbie Bach himself and other people at MEDC you should just check this out. During the breakout sessions, Orcas, the next version of Visual Studio, got lots of coverage. Of course together with the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 which ships together with Visual Studio Orcas. Mark Prentice has a blog entry that nicely describes some of the new features of the .NET Compact Framework 3.5. I strongly encourage you to download this new exciting version of Visual Studio. Hey, the good news is that you can even download it as a Virtual PC image, so you don't have to be afraid of installing beta software on a production machine.

With all of these exciting new technologies being covered at MEDC 2007, I feel sort of a loser, talking about things that are avaible today in the .NET Compact Framework 2.0. The only thing left to do for me is spice my talk up with enough jokes so attendees might feel that our current technology is cool as well. Especially of course since we are covering asynchronous programming techniques for the .NET Compact Framework in my talk. It is all about multithreading, but hey, there are some added bonusses. If you want to learn about how to add asynchronous support to your own classes you should definitely attend my session at MEDC on Wednesday May 2nd at 3.45 PM (if you happen to be at MEDC). I am sure we will cover this material later on in one or more webcasts as well, but hey, this is the chance for you to meet me in person and discuss all those things you want to know about multithreading but never dared asking.

This sort of sums up my first day at MEDC 2007. There is much more to talk about but I need to get ready for that presentation that is due in less than 15 hours.

In the upcoming months, there are tons of opportunities to meet you all in person. Just make sure to attend either Tech Ed, MEDC or MEDC Europe. During Tech Ed I will present one session in the Windows Mobile track. Here is the session description:

Improving the Performance of your Application using Diagnostic Tools in the .NET Compact Framework

This session will discuss how you can improve the performance of your .NET Compact Framework application by using the diagnostic tools that are included with the Compact Framework. We will also discuss what are the typical issues that your application might be affected by and how to detect and overcome them to deliver a snappier and better user experience. We will also cover the new improved diagnostic and performance analysis tools that will ship with the .NET Compact Framework v 3.5.

Right now it looks like this session is scheduled on June 7th at 4.30 PM. This means there is no excuse not to attend this session. Even though the Tech Ed party is on June 6th at Universal Studios, my session is late enough for you to make it back to the conference center.

During MEDC I will present the following (and of course coolest of all) session:

NET Compact Framework Asynchronous Programming Techniques

You will learn more about the following when attending this session: The .NET Compact Framework 2.0 offers a range of capabilities to use asynchronous programming techniques inside your managed application. Even though the complexity of your application will slightly increase, making use of multiple threads inside your application will help give your end-user a better overall experience by maintaining responsive user interfaces. You will learn how to properly start and terminate threads, how to update user interface controls inside multiple threads and how to call web services asynchronously. After attending this sample filled presentation, multithreading is completely demystified and you will feel confident to develop multithreaded applications.

Right now, this session is scheduled on May 2nd at 3.45 PM. I can even give you the room we are meeting: Veronese 2404-05-06 in the wonderful Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

Finally I will (co)present a ton of sessions during MEDC Europe in Berlin, Germany. For now I will just give you the session titles. More details will follow soon.

APP316 - Windows Live Services on Windows Mobile
APP306 - What's New in Device Emulator 3.0
ILL203 - Introduction to Building Line-Of-Business (LOB) Applications on Windows Mobile
APP303 - Adapt Your App: Building Windows Mobile© Applications that Seamlessly Run on Any Device
APP212 - Panel Discussion: Windows Mobile© Application Development

Further more I am also very excited to be part of Mobile Connections Fall in Las Vegas again this year. More details about my sessions during this great event will follow later.

Last but not least! Please don't forget our MSDN Webcasts. Rob Tiffany, Jim Wilson and I will try to deliver you some great content during MSDN Webcasts as well. My next Webcast is scheduled on May 9th at 11 AM PST will cover An Overview of Device Emulator 2.0. Here is the Webcast description:

The Windows Mobile 6 software development kit (SDK) ships with a new Microsoft Device Emulator. In addition to being much faster than its predecessor, Microsoft Device Emulator version 2.0 has many new capabilities to emulate different device states, including the ability to emulate running on batteries. Being a true Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) emulator, the Device Emulator 2.0 runs the same code as real devices. You can use a separate Cellular Emulator with the Device Emulator to test different communications scenarios. Join this example-filled webcast as we take an in-depth look at using the Device Emulator version 2.0 during application development. We explore how to cradle the emulator, run the emulator on battery power, and use the emulator to test the phone capabilities of your application.

This is the topic we are hopefully going to discuss during my next MSDN Webcast. Right now it is scheduled somewhere in the second week of May, meaning I will present live from Phoenix, AZ. The advantage of that is that I will at least be awake, since presenting MSDN Webcasts from The Netherlands (where I spent some time as well), always means that I will be speaking in the evening or worse case, even at night. Anyway, the new Device Emulator 2.0 that ships with the Windows Mobile 6.0 SDK has an interesting side effect. Today I was testing lots of my demo's for MEDC 2007 in Las Vegas. It turned out that almost everytime I was targetting the emulator, it was gone, even though I didn't deliberately close it. Well, finally I found out what was causing this. During my Webcast on the Windows Mobile 6.0 State & Notification Broker I switched the emulator for my last demonstration to run on batteries. The emulator is so smart now that it puts itself into sleep when it is not being used for some time. That is exactly what was happening to me. After two minutes or so, my emulator switched to standby mode, since it assumed it was running on batteries. The net result: each time I deployed a new version of an application, the emulator needed to restore itself. This is some great functionality, if you are really testing for it. However, if you just want the emulator to be available, make sure that you deselect running on battery power. If you don't have a clue what I am talking about, that would be a great reason to come and join me for the Webcast about the Device Emulator. When more details are availabe, I will share them with you.

For those folks that attended my MSDN Webcast on the Windows Mobile 6.0 State and Notification Broker, but also for all of you who tuned in to the on-demand version of the Webcast, you can download the all samples right here.

Sample Code

If you want to more information about the Windows Mobile 5.0 and Windows Mobile 6.0 State & Notification Broker you should definitely read these excellent articles, written by Jim Wilson.

The State and Notifications Broker Part 1

The State and Notifications Broker Part 2

Jim even promised to write a third part on this topic, which already indicates that yesterday's webcast is only an introduction about this cool technology.

Even though I am a little late with this announcement we are running an MSDN Webcast about the Windows Mobile 6 and to be honest Windows Mobile 5 State and Notification Broker. As aways my samples will be extremely simple but hopefully they give you enough informaton to use the Windows Mobile 6 State and Notification Broker yourself. The Webcast is scheduled for Wednesday March 21st at 11.00 PST. Even though the USA changed to DST one and a half weeks ago, you hopefully will be able to meet us live during this Webcast. Let me make sure to have the time right by passing you the time in GMT as well, which is 6.00 PM GMT. During this Webcast, I will demonstrate the new Windows Mobile 6.0 emulator for the first time, unfortunatly only limited to using the State and Notification broker. However, Jim Wilson and I will speak this Thursday about a Webcasts series about covering Windows Mobile 6.0 in depth that will be aired in May. So here is a unique chance for all of you. If you want to know more about particular Windows Mobile 6.0 related topics, make sure to drop either Jim or me an email before Thursday, and we might consider taking your suggestion into a Webcast. At the same time, if you have a chance to attend MEDC 2007 in Las Vegas, you will have the chance to meet Jim and me in person. For those folks living in Europe, make sure to attend MEDC Europe and I will definitely have time to speak to you 1-on-1.

Before I run into problems let me make it absolutely clear that I love my brand new Zune. As a matter of facts I replaced my G3 iPod with it and I am very happy with the Zune. Since I have written some more or less negative comments about sharing our knowledge regarding Windows CE - see my column here - and had to explain to some folks why I wrote that column, I am very careful with my criticism. However, I personally do believe in freedom of press, so I write down my feelings anyway. Again, I love my Zune, but in the last few weeks I ran into some problems. First off, all the audio files I downloaded from the Zune Marketplace have paused several times when playing them on the device. The remarkable thing about this is that only I ran into problems every second tune. This has been discussed online and it turns out that the Zune is playing the files properly when leaving the backlight on continuously. Even though this seems a cool work around, it is not really working for me. I am using my Zune most of the time when flying between Europe and the USA (usually a 10+ hour flight since I mostly visit the Westcoast). Having the backlight on reduces my batery capacity from the expected 12 hours to only 5 hours, so I am left with 5+ hours without music. Luckily I still have a few other MP3 devices, so I can live with this "problem" for the time being, although I hope that the Zune folks will release V1.3 of the firmware soon to solve this problem. Today however, I found another problem. I have been on the road with my Zune for two weeks and when I tried to synchronize it again tonight, the Zune software on my desktop computer thought that I did not have any content on my Zune device. This is pretty bad, since I had it filled with almost 30 GB of video and audio files. The only option left for me was erasing all data on the Zune and resyncing everything again. This is not really acceptable, since it takes over an hour to sync everything back up to the device. This brings me to a product Commodre is about to release, the Commodore Gravel In-Pocket. My Company, PTS Software, has been involved in creating the application software for this cool new device and we have also been working on making the underlying Windows CE (5.0) platform stable. Today I talked to one of my co-workers who thought it was a little too early to bring the In-Pocket device to market. Even though I want devices to be in perfect shape, I now have the opinion that shipping with a functional, but not error free device is acceptable. It seems that consumer electronics products don't have to be perfect at the time of release. Even though I hate that idea, I have similar experiences with Zune, but also with Windows Vista. The Zune does not correctly playback content I have downloaded from the Marketplace, the Zune I own has some problems with synchronizing to my library and hey, don't get me started on Windows Vista. I have had lots of problems getting Windows Vista to run Visual Studio 2005 before SP1 was officially released. Let me repeat the beginning of this blog entry. I am totally happy with my Zune. The sound quality is superior to any other multi-media device that I have been using so far, yes, including devices that starts with i-.... (as in "Hello, I am an i-.....). I am also completely happy with Windows Vista as my new desktop Operating System, but it seems that both products were released just a few months too soon to get rid of all problems. After experiencing this, I think it is perfectly reasonable to release the Commodore Gravel In-Pocket one of these days (unfortunately only in a few countries in Europe right now). Hey guys, go for it!!!! However, funny enough, we don't seem to have problems like these with the release of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 and with the release of Windows Mobile 6.0. Should I just be gracefull to be partly involved with these products? I don't really know. I think both Zune and Gravel In-Pocket are cool devices. So, Zune folks @ Microsoft, if you want to know more about my experiences with your device, I'll be glad to give you more information about my particular problems and assist you helping to find solutions for these problems. Just drop me an email. At the same time .... Hey friends at Commodore. If you run into simular or different problems, just ping me and I would be happy to assist you guys as well. Talking about Commodore devices .... It would be great if I could get one or two loaner device (just talking about In-Pocket here). I know your schedule does not yet include a US release, but some folks at Microsoft, but definitely also MEDC Las Vegas attendees would be thrilled to see your device in action. Can I take a couple of devices with me when I am heading out to Vegas for MEDC?

Even though I am a little late with this announcement we are running an MSDN Webcast about the Windows Mobile 6 and to be honest Windows Mobile 5 State and Notification Broker. As aways my samples will be extremely simple but hopefully they give you enough informaton to use the Windows Mobile 6 State and Notification Broker yourself. The Webcast is scheduled for Wednesday March 21st at 11.00 PST. Even though the USA changed to DST one and a half weeks ago, you hopefully will be able to meet us live during this Webcast. Let me make sure to have the time right by passing you the time in GMT as well, which is 6.00 PM GMT. During this Webcast, I will demonstrate the new Windows Mobile 6.0 emulator for the first time, unfortunatly only limited to using the State and Notification broker. However, Jim Wilson and I will speak this Thursday about a Webcasts series about covering Windows Mobile 6.0 in depth that will be aired in May. So here is a unique chance for all of you. If you want to know more about particular Windows Mobile 6.0 related topics, make sure to drop either Jim or me an email before Thursday, and we might consider taking your suggestion into a Webcast. At the same time, if you have a chance to attend MEDC 2007 in Las Vegas, you will have the chance to meet Jim and me in person. For those folks living in Europe, make sure to attend MEDC Europe and I will definitely have time to speak to you 1-on-1.

Before I run into problems let me make it absolutely clear that I love my brand new Zune. As a matter of facts I replaced my G3 iPod with it and I am very happy with the Zune. Since I have written some more or less negative comments about sharing our knowledge regarding Windows CE - see my column here - and had to explain to some folks why I wrote that column, I am very careful with my criticism. However, I personally do believe in freedom of press, so I write down my feelings anyway. Again, I love my Zune, but in the last few weeks I ran into some problems. First off, all the audio files I downloaded from the Zune Marketplace have paused several times when playing them on the device. The remarkable thing about this is that only I ran into problems every second tune. This has been discussed online and it turns out that the Zune is playing the files properly when leaving the backlight on continuously. Even though this seems a cool work around, it is not really working for me. I am using my Zune most of the time when flying between Europe and the USA (usually a 10+ hour flight since I mostly visit the Westcoast). Having the backlight on reduces my batery capacity from the expected 12 hours to only 5 hours, so I am left with 5+ hours without music. Luckily I still have a few other MP3 devices, so I can live with this "problem" for the time being, although I hope that the Zune folks will release V1.3 of the firmware soon to solve this problem. Today however, I found another problem. I have been on the road with my Zune for two weeks and when I tried to synchronize it again tonight, the Zune software on my desktop computer thought that I did not have any content on my Zune device. This is pretty bad, since I had it filled with almost 30 GB of video and audio files. The only option left for me was erasing all data on the Zune and resyncing everything again. This is not really acceptable, since it takes over an hour to sync everything back up to the device. This brings me to a product Commodre is about to release, the Commodore Gravel In-Pocket. My Company, PTS Software, has been involved in creating the application software for this cool new device and we have also been working on making the underlying Windows CE (5.0) platform stable. Today I talked to one of my co-workers who thought it was a little too early to bring the In-Pocket device to market. Even though I want devices to be in perfect shape, I now have the opinion that shipping with a functional, but not error free device is acceptable. It seems that consumer electronics products don't have to be perfect at the time of release. Even though I hate that idea, I have similar experiences with Zune, but also with Windows Vista. The Zune does not correctly playback content I have downloaded from the Marketplace, the Zune I own has some problems with synchronizing to my library and hey, don't get me started on Windows Vista. I have had lots of problems getting Windows Vista to run Visual Studio 2005 before SP1 was officially released. Let me repeat the beginning of this blog entry. I am totally happy with my Zune. The sound quality is superior to any other multi-media device that I have been using so far, yes, including devices that starts with i-.... (as in "Hello, I am an i-.....). I am also completely happy with Windows Vista as my new desktop Operating System, but it seems that both products were released just a few months too soon to get rid of all problems. After experiencing this, I think it is perfectly reasonable to release the Commodore Gravel In-Pocket one of these days (unfortunately only in a few countries in Europe right now). Hey guys, go for it!!!! However, funny enough, we don't seem to have problems like these with the release of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 and with the release of Windows Mobile 6.0. Should I just be gracefull to be partly involved with these products? I don't really know. I think both Zune and Gravel In-Pocket are cool devices. So, Zune folks @ Microsoft, if you want to know more about my experiences with your device, I'll be glad to give you more information about my particular problems and assist you helping to find solutions for these problems. Just drop me an email. At the same time .... Hey friends at Commodore. If you run into simular or different problems, just ping me and I would be happy to assist you guys as well. Talking about Commodore devices .... It would be great if I could get one or two loaner device (just talking about In-Pocket here). I know your schedule does not yet include a US release, but some folks at Microsoft, but definitely also MEDC Las Vegas attendees would be thrilled to see your device in action. Can I take a couple of devices with me when I am heading out to Vegas for MEDC?

Hopefully many of you out there are able to make it either to MEDC 2007 in Las Vegas or to TechEd 2007 in Orlando. During both events I will be speaking on different topics. Since I will be delivering one talk at each event, there will be a lot of time to discuss Windows Embedded and Windows Mobile Development in general on a one-to-one basis if you are interested. Perhaps we could even take one of Mike Hall's original idea's and get together for a geek breakfast, lunch or dinner during one or more conference days. No agenda but talking about developing for embedded and mobile devices, basically talking about anything you want. Maybe a few informal get togethers will increase the value of conferences for all of us. After all, getting to know each other personally and doing a bit of human networking is a perk that we will get for free attending developer conferences. We might even get Mike to find a proper meeting point, in that case undoubtfully close to the nearest Starbucks. In case you want to know, I will present a session around .NET Compact Framework Asynchronous Programming Techniques at MEDC and a session around Improving Application Performance using Diagnostic Tools in the .NET Compact Framework at Tech-Ed. Over the upcoming weeks I will share more details on both sessions with you. Finally, something you definitely don't want to miss out on either, if you are joining us for Tech-Ed in Orlando, is Jim Wilson's pre-conference session on Windows Mobile.

Today I was looking for some archieved webcasts and I came accross the top 10 of highest rated webcasts. On number 10 of the list I saw a webcast with a familiar title. This is the first time one of my webcasts ended up in the Webcast top 10, a list with almost as much authority as the Billboard 100. Of course this information changes week after week, so you'd better hurry to take a look. The very cool part about this is that a Windows Mobile webcast is listed in the top 10. If you didn't have the chance yet, you can listen to this particular webcast about Windows Live on Windows Mobile devices here. Since this is part of a series I hope you will also check out the other parts. After all, tuning in to my webcasts only gets you familiar with the plumbing. To really appreciate the power of Windows Live Services on Windows Mobile devices you should definitely check out parts 3 and 4 in which Jim Wilson ties everything together and even ends up with a really handy little application which, I admit, I downloaded immediately after his webcast and I am actually using it on my Windows Mobile device. You can find Jim's sample application, titled "Doing an MSN Web Search and Finding & Updating a contact's phone number with MSN Search" at this location. To find liks to all parts of the Windows Live on Windows Mobile series, simply click here.

In preparation for a session at a local Dutch event I decided to run a demo using Visual Studio 2005 to develop a Windows application, a Smartphone application, a PocketPC application, a .NET Micro Framework application, all of course in managed code and to build a Windows Embedded CE 6.0 OS design together with a native application to run on my newly created Windows Embedded CE 6.0 OS as well. The idea is to start Visual Studio 2005 once, never leave this development tool and achieve all of the above. During the first rehearsal today this turned out to be a very convincing demo. Right now I am even wondering if I should write a small article about the experience on DotNETForDevices. Being able to target many different platforms does of course not mean that you don’t need specific skills for each of them. After all, when developing a Windows application, who cares about processor usage, performance and memory consumption? Well, to be honest, you should! Your users will simply like your application better if you take all these topics into consideration. However, they become much more critical when developing a Windows Mobile application. With slower processors, designing for performance is much more important. With a frequently occurring low memory situation, you should make sure to consume as little memory as possible. And with devices running on batteries, you’d better leave the processor alone unless you absolutely have to use it. All of the above can be applied as well for .NET Micro Framework applications, although there is a difference. Those applications should typically run with even less memory available. Creating a Windows Embedded 6.0 OS Design is something completely different. Not only do you probably need great programming skills. You also need to be familiar with Windows Embedded CE 6.0 as an operating system. You need to know which modules and components to add to your OS design. You might need to develop your own Board Support Package and, more likely, you might need to develop one or more device drivers. To create native applications, you of course also need to know the C or C++ programming language. This is something I have not even touched in this little entry. You not only have lots of different targets you can reach with Visual Studio 2005, you can also choose between languages like Visual Basic.NET, C#, J#, managed C++ and native C++. Of course not every language is applicable for each platform, but Visual Studio 2005 has it all. Going back to the demo, I will target 5 different platforms, make use of 3 different programming languages and 3 different versions of the Common Language Runtime for those managed applications I show. Pretty impressive, right? There is only one more thing on my wish list. I also want to create a managed application using XAML with some C# code to react on fired events. There is only one small problem. Tomorrow I need to get some basic XAML skills to at least create a cool button inside a WPF application. When the button is clicked I want to show a simple message box, coded in C#. Ah well, I have a day left. That should be enough to get sort of familiar with XAML, right?

I am totally against Microsoft bashing but this time I at least had to say something I really do not like. Just in case you missed it, but also because I assume more people read my blog than my weekly columns, take a look here and do not hesitate to share your feelings with me.

In that case there is no reason to look any further. Last week I attended the Windows Embedded CE 6.0 train-the-trainer training in Redmond and I am ready to go. The official Windows Embedded CE 6.0 training material gives you a great introduction around this new version of Windows CE. During an intensive, 5 day training you will learn about the Operating System Features, about the Tools for Platform Development, about the Operating System Internals and about the Operating System Components, all in a nice overview with lots of labs to practice. After that things get serious when we dig into the Build System, Board Support Packages, Developing Device Drivers, Customizing an OS Design, Application Development and Testing. After attending this training you should be familiar with all the tools you need to develop your own Windows Embedded CE 6.0 based solution and it should be possible for you to get a head start with developing a succesful product. When you are living in the Benelux countries we could get you a training like within one of two weeks if you wish. If you live in other parts of the world, don't hesitate to contact me anyway. Perhaps you know me from Webcasts, MEDC's, Embedded World Conferences or other events. If you think you can keep up with me for a week or so, just drop me an email. I am willing to travel around the world to educate you and your company. Oh, here is the proof that I am really qualified to teach this training.

Simply contact me directly or send an email to my company. I can't wait to get you up and running, developing great embedded systems using Windows Embedded CE 6.0

This week a whole bunch of teachers is getting together to learn more about the brand new Windows Embedded CE 6.0 training. This training is ideal for developers who want to start using Windows Embedded CE 6.0. After a week of intensive training you know a lot about features of the operating system, you know how to create your own OS design, you get a feeling for what is needed to create a Board Support Package and you will learn how to create device drivers for Windows Embedded CE 6.0. Of course it is impossible to become an expert after only one week of training, but this training offers you a great starting point to begin developing Windows CE based solutions. Here you can find information about companies who can provide this training for you. However, if you are living in the Benelux and if you are interested in taking this training, don't hesitate to send me an email. For those folks that are already using Windows CE 5.0 and are interested in the differences between Windows CE 5.0 and Windows Embedded CE 6.0 I am currently looking at the possibilities to provide you with a one or two day refresh course, covering the differences between the two versions of the operating system and introducting you to Platform Builder 6.0 which very nicely integrates in Visual Studio 2005. In case you think that it is fun to attend a train-the-trainer training, you better think twice and take a look what we had to go through. For those folks living in Europe: The white stuff that is covering the ground is called snow. Something very rarely seen these days. Thank you Mike for making this picture available to the world.

Over the last two weeks I presented two MSND Webcasts on using Windows Live Services on Windows Mobile devices. Using Windows Live Services you get a lot of processing power behind the palms of your hand operating your Windows Mobile Device. These Webcasts are part of a 4 part series titled “Introducing Windows Live Services on Mobile Devices”. In episode 1 you can learn how to access Web Services inside a .NET Compact Framework application. As you can see, this is very easy using managed code. Simply add a Web Reference to the Web Service you want to communicate with and it seems that you are simply using managed classes on your device. You might not even be aware of the fact that you are calling out to a service over the Internet. That is, unless you don’t have connectivity. When no connectivity is available you will get exceptions. Even when you are connected you might run into some performance issues, since you don’t have a clue how long it will take until you get results back from a Web Service. Since part 1 of the Webcast series is simply an introduction on calling Web Services, there is not much discussion about device connectivity and performance. If you want to learn more about device connectivity, you can find a number of excellent resources following these links:

State & Notification Broker in Windows Mobile 5.0

Monitor Clients and respond to change

In episode 2 of the Webcast Series you can learn how to take RSS feeds from Websites (including Windows Live Services) and take those feeds inside your own application for further processing. Using the presented techniques, you can make use of data, returned from Websites without the need to access those Websites inside a browser. With a little creativity and some work I will leave to you, you can create a whole family of brand new applications, combining the power of a rich client application on your Windows Mobile device with the power of Web servers, feeding your application with data you are interested in.

Both Webcast episodes have sample code available. If you are interested in the sample code you can download it here.

Sample code for part 1 of the series.

Sample code for part 2 of the series.

Don't forget to attend part 3 of the series as well when Jim Wilson discusses how to combine data from WIndows Live services with your own business data in a mobile line-of-business application. Make sure you mark this Webcast in your calendar and sign up here. Jim will present this Webcast live on January 18 at 12.00 PM PST.

Here is something definitely worth looking at. Perhaps you browse regularly through the list of upcoming MSDN Webcasts. There are quite a few Webcasts each and every day. Therefore it is not the best experience to browse through a long list of titles. You might easily miss one you are interested in. The Webcast Calendar is great to assist you looking for those Webcasts that really help you do your work better. Make sure to give it a try and sign up for lots of Webcasts. After all, attending them is totally free. Better yet, if you are living in the USA and attend one or more live Webcasts in the upcoming few months, you might even win a Microsoft Zune 30 GB digital media player.  

January feels like Windows Live Services on Mobile Devices month. Especially if you take a look at the four part Webcast series that Jim Wilson and I are presenting each Thursday at 12 PM PST. On January 11 the second part of this series covers using Windows Live QnA. More general this Webcast shows you how to use RSS feeds inside Windows Mobile Devices. If you have not done so yet, you can sign up here for this Webcast titled “MSDN Webcast: Introducing Windows Live Services on Mobile Devices (Part 2 of 4): Consuming RSS-Based Services”. I am looking forward to see you this Thursday.

Here is something definitely worth looking at. Perhaps you browse regularly through the list of upcoming MSDN Webcasts. There are quite a few Webcasts each and every day. Therefore it is not the best experience to browse through a long list of titles. You might easily miss one you are interested in. The Webcast Calendar is great to assist you looking for those Webcasts that really help you do your work better. Make sure to give it a try and sign up for lots of Webcasts. After all, attending them is totally free. Better yet, if you are living in the USA and attend one or more live Webcasts in the upcoming few months, you might even win a Microsoft Zune 30 GB digital media player.  

January feels like Windows Live Services on Mobile Devices month. Especially if you take a look at the four part Webcast series that Jim Wilson and I are presenting each Thursday at 12 PM PST. On January 11 the second part of this series covers using Windows Live QnA. More general this Webcast shows you how to use RSS feeds inside Windows Mobile Devices. If you have not done so yet, you can sign up here for this Webcast titled “MSDN Webcast: Introducing Windows Live Services on Mobile Devices (Part 2 of 4): Consuming RSS-Based Services”. I am looking forward to see you this Thursday.

Maybe you just started working again after a nice Holiday break or perhaps you are still enjoying that Holiday break.  You might even have looked at the MSDN Webcast site to find out if you could learn something new. Today there is not too much choice and this is sort of a short notice, but hey. What about learning something cool about Windows Live in combination with Windows Mobile Devices? Today we are kicking off a four part Webcast series on using Windows Live Services on Windows Mobile Devices. We are still a good 3 hours away from the start of this Webcast so there is plenty of time to sign up and join me. If you do, hopefully you like the content and get curious for the next 3 parts of the series. I’ll inform you about the contents of the next part of the series later this week.