J2i.Net

For those that don't know I've been active in the Microsoft Forums for a little over a year.  I've been keeping track of how many answers I've provided. It took me about a year to reach 500 answers in August. It is now November and I am up to 800 questions.  Im active in more Windows Phone related forums now. That's why my rate of answering questions has gone up.

View my profile here.

Tags: Forums

Microsoft released a few new features for the Windows Marketplace for Mobile today.  Among them is the ability to browse applications from ones web browser at https://marketplace.windowsphone.com . Also the advanced security is now available to developers wishing to protect their applications from piracy. You can read more about these updates here.

Tags: windows mobile, marketplace

It looks that the first Zii hardware is shipping for what might be something that ends up in the hands of the consumers. The ZMS-08 chip is shipping in the first quarter of 2010 in a 13mm x 13mm 424 pin FBGA 1GHz package that's capable of performing Blu-ray and other media intensive operations while consuming low power. The chip was designed to support Android and Creative's own Plasma OS. OTher features of the chip include OpenGL ES hardware acceleration, X-Fi (extreme fidelity) audio effects, and a Cortex-A8 ARMS core with a SIMD hardware unit.

Tags: zii

Yesterday the popular misconception of the day was that Samsung was planning to drop Windows Mobile.  This rumor was fueled by the announcement that Samsung was going to release a new platform that it has developed called "Bada." Seems that the blog-o-sphere took this announcement to mean that Samsung's WM lineup would be replaced with Bada based phones. DigiTimes is reporting that Don Joo Lee has stated that "Samsung Electronics will continue to adopt Windows Mobile- and Android-based platforms for new smartphones launched in 2010, but will quit Symbian and adopt in-house developed open operating system Samsung Bada." Now that this has been straightened up, on to other things.

Found via WMPowerUser.com

Tags: windows mobile, samsung

In listening to my usual round of podcast I heard a participant in one of my favourite podcasts (http://msmobiles.com) express a complaint about how exchange was working for her on Windows Mobile 6.5.  I didn't think much of it at first but after hearing of a few more problems with Windows Mobile 6.5 and attachments in exchange I finally decided to look into it myself.  The problem was that when she would open an e-mail with an attachment on her Windows Mobile phone the attachment did not show, but if she opened the e-mail from her desktop or iPhone the attachment was there.  The problem was attributed to the Windows Mobile 6.5 rom. Afterall it was workign elsewhere and had worked for her when she used Windows Mobile 6.1 several months ago.

I fired up the emulators and configured one to use my corporate e-mail account.  I sent myself an attachment and it worked fine.  I then reconfigured the phone to use Gmail's exchange service and experienced the same problem that she did.  Both accounts worked fine on my iPhone.  Since the problem appeared to be specific to Widnows Phone and Gmail I did a bit more searching and found that it is a problem on Google's side.  It has been acknowledged as a problem and a fix is expected to come out sometime "soon" (the Google employee is unable to state an exact date).

So if you are having any problems with Gmail over Exchange and your Windows phone there's nothing wrong with your phone. It's something Google is dealing with.

More information can be found here.

Tags: windows mobile, programming

One of the nice things of Windows Mobile Phone having APIs that are shared with the desktop operating system is that many of the publications made for the desktop are applicable to the device's OS.  One such resouce that I have is the "Windows 2000 Graphics API Black Book."  The book is full of both discussions of the Windows Graphic APIs and solutions based on them many of which run fine on Windows Mobile Phone.  Best of all if you want to get the book now you can get it used for as low as 11 USD or new for about 25 USD. Amazon shows about 29 copies of this book in stock. I encourage every one to get a copy.

Tags: windows mobile, windows ce,

Over the pastfew  week Microsoft has been updating many of their forums.  For those not familiar Microsoft host the MSDN forums so that those working with related technologies can communicate and ask each other for assistance.    The Smart Device Development forums when through their metamorphosis last week.  While there are still a few things transitioning over the migration of the core information and functionality seems to be complete.  The interface of the new forum is more aesthetically pleasing and much more responsive (it is based in Ajax) and the editor is much easier to use and gives more control over formatting.   

If you are ever stuck with a problem that you cannot figure out then this is always a good place to start.  However the promptness and accuracy of your response is going to be dependent on the clarity of your question. So if you've never posted in a newsgroup or forum before I'd like to direct you to some general rules that Daniel Moth wrote that will help ensure that you get the best answer.  

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I often post on subjects that frequently become of relevance to post within the Smart Device MSDN forums. Today's item of interest is updating controls from worker threads.  ALl too often a developer new to programming on Windows devices will start a worker thread to perform a process then update a textbox, progress bar, or other control from the worker thread and wonder why it won't work.

To make a long story short you should never directly updte a UI element from a secondary thread.  A UI control is owned by the thread on which it was created.  No other thread can manipulate that control directly.  Instead request to update the control must be marshaled to the owning thread.  Controls within the .Net framework have a method named Incoke that will marshal method calls for you.

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One of the things that I love about Microsoft is that once you learn a Microsoft technology parts of it are transferable to other Microsoft Platforms. The .Net technologies are an excellent example of this. There's also DirectX (portions of which can be used on Windows Mobile devices) and MFC.

Another such technology is MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes).  MFC is a library of C++ application framework library for creating Windows applications.  It is a native code library, so you have full access to the native API without the need of platform invoke declarations or redeclaring structures for making native calls.  But it also provides several high level classes for creating UI elements and responding to windows messages. I would say that MFC lives half way between .Net based programs and traditional native non-MFC applications. 

I am engaging in a project for which it will be easier to use native code.  The project is going to rely on some third party native code libraries with a massive amount structures.  For the first phase of this project I plan to use MFC so that I can make a prototype with the third party library.  Later on I will make an abstraction layer that gives simpler access to the functionality that I need and then I will create a .Net wrapper for it.  In the coming weeks once the project reaches a certain level of functionality, stability, and presentability I'll be posting the code on CodeProject.com.  I don't want to say anything about the nature of the project just yet, but I'm sure it will be very popular!

Tags: windows mobile, mfc