Detecting the SDF file version

SDF files don't have an explicit way of letting you know their versions. What can you do to tell the version of a given SDF file? In my products I detect the SDF file version as a side effect of opening it: if a given engine can open that SDF file then I can safely assume it has the same version as the engine. This is not a very straightforward approach because it requires that you have all engines installed on the device (not a typical scenario).

The alternative way to detect the SDF file version is by reading a few signature bytes on the file. Just open the file, set the read location at offset 16 and read the 32 bit int there. The following values will tell you the file version:
2.0: 0x73616261
3.0: 0x002dd714
3.5: 0x00357b9d

I wrote a very simple .NET CF 2.0 application to illustrate this. The download link is this. If you find any SDF file that fails this test, please let me know.

WM6 GPSID problem workaround

John Spaith from Microsoft has blogged about a workaround solution to the HTC GPS problems on WM6. Apparently the size of the GPS_POSITION structure must be tweaked in order for the call to GPSGetPosition to work, but this can only be applied on devices where the first call returns 87... I actually worked around this by falling back to the COM port.