Off to Seattle!

Tomorrow I'm off in a crazy trip to Seattle for the 2008 MVP Summit. If you want to meet me, I'll (try to) be here:



Hopefully, I will try to blog about what I can disclose about the Summit and any info I get there.

WTL Helper and VS 2008

My good friend Cristiano Severini has figured out a way to adapt Sergey Solezhentsev's WTL Helper to VS 2008 with a little help from me (I helped him match the VS 2005 typelibs to 2008 because I have both installed side by side). Here's how he did it: WTL Helper and VS 2008.

Crino ROCKS!

Smartphone keyboard handling with GAPI

Here's the scenario: you are working on a DirectDraw full screen application and you require full control of the device keyboard. Things have worked nicely with the Pocket PC and even with the WM5 Smartphone, but when you move to WM6 your keyboard is gone. You do get the WM_KEYDOWN and WM_KEYUP messages, but most of them only report the dreaded VK_PROCESSKEY and ImmGetVirtualKey() does not seem to help at all. What can you do?

I found a solution for this problem that solves most of the issues above, but also uncovers some other issues. The solution is to call ImmAssociateContext() on your main window passing NULL as the HIMC parameter. This will remove the input context association from the window, and you get the keyboard back. But...

... now you have to handle the keyboard mappings yourself. That's the price you pay. On some devices this means having a mixed keyboard (numbers and alpha keys) so you must internally implement a keyboard map in order to make it work as the user expects. To make matters worse, the keyboard map is device dependent so you are in for a bit of work. Finally, I have found that on some devices you don't get all the keys, especially the special keys for mail and contacts. These devices seem to have these keys wired to launch the matching applications and not even GAPI seems to release them...

Smartphone display timeout

How do you prevent a Smartphone (sorry, a Windows Mobile 6 Standard) device from falling asleep? I tried everything, including sending null keys:

keybd_event(VK_NONAME, 0, KEYEVENTF_SILENT, 0);

This nasty little trick works but also forces your backlight to the maximum and you may not want it. What I really want to do is mimick going to the Power Management applet and setting the "Display time out" to "Never". With this setting, your Smartphone device will never go to sleep. So how do you achieve this? It's actually quite easy.

The display time out value is stored on the device registry under:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Power

All you have to do is set the Display value (DWORD) to -1 and make the system know that the value changed. How do you break the news? Simple again:

PostMessage(HWND_BROADCAST, WM_WININICHANGE, 0, 0);

If you use this in your application to avoid the device from falling asleep (I also call SystemIdleTimerReset and SHIdleTimerReset every few seconds), please remember to set the value back to the original value.

Insomnia rules!

Windows Mobile Remote Control - Published

You can now get the latest version of the Windows Mobile Remote Controller application here. This code adds compression to the screen data transport so it becomes a bit faster. Enjoy!

My first hours with VS 2008

My first few hours of work with VS 2008 have been a pure joy. This new beast performs like a champ and has no apparent quarrels with Vista. Upgrading the Data Port Console solution to the 2008 format was a breeze and I was even rewarded with a C# compilation error that had gone unnoticed in VS 2005. The whole product feels much more robust and reliable under Vista and the visuals are also nicer. So far, it has been a great experience. Highly recommended!

Don't worry - if I have anything to gripe about, you will know it.

Installing VS 2008

I finally decided to install VS 2008 this morning. Why so late? I have been very busy and my customers use mainly VS 2005 so I had no urgency to install VS 2008. Now that it has been officially launched I will surely get more and more requests to migrate the products to .NET 3.5 so VS 2008 is a requirement.

Installation went as smothly as possible except for a mysterious shutdown at the end. I was not present, so I cannot tell you what happened but I suspect that the Vodafone 3G card is playing tricks on me. Again.

After installing, I looked at the C drive to check for free space and was appalled to see that it was below 50%. After installing Vista SP1, my C drive used space magically shrunk and has been growing very fast ever since. The culprit? System restore points! After clearing them I got back to post SP1 install conditions. Cool, my disk is back.

Raffael's Blog

Now, here is an ultra-cool blog: Mobile Development! Thank you Chris for the heads-up.

WMDC woes

It's almost a year now since I started using Vista Ultimate. The new OS came on the ASUS VX2 I bought last year and I have found that the overall experience has been very positive. There are a few minor snags like the apparent sluggishness in the couple of minutes after Windows boots and WMDC. This is my major gripe with Vista - I never know when one of my WM5 or WM6 devices will connect or not. One of the quick and dirty solutions I have found is to uninstall the device network adapter, disconnect the device and reconnect. To do this, go to the Control Panel, open the System applet and select the Device Manager link. Under the "Network adapters" tree node, locate the Windows Mobile device and uninstall it. Remove the device and connect it again. WMDC should recognize the device again.

There is an alternative that I have not tested yet and was pointed to me by Mark Arteaga on the PocketPC FAQ site. Anyway this should be an easier experience, especially for people like me who need to connect to everything, from Pocket PC 2003 devices to the latest WM6 devices throwing in a few bizzare Windows CE 5 GPS devices in between...

Windows Mobile Remote Control

Here is the first version of the Windows Mobile Remote Control application. It basically extends the concepts I developed for the Code Project article "A Remote Windows Mobile Screen Grabber". Instead of a blocking RAPI call, this project uses a streamed call so that a live connection persists between the device and the desktop. Mouse and keyboard events are now sent over to the device so you can remotely control your device from the desktop. Please note that this is still a bit crude and will fail under some circumstances, like when you launch a Direct Draw application on the device. For regular GDI applications, it should work just fine (if you can live with 4-5 fps, that is).

Now I must add some way to send the special device keys, like the phone and left / right selection buttons.

Windows Mobile Developer Center

MSDN has revamped the Windows Mobile Developer Center. Go take a look (yes, you will find native code there). I am especially interested in the DirectX samples.

On another note, I will be working throughout this weekend on a Windows Mobile remote control server (something like Pocket Controller). After writing the screen grabber tool, this is an extension I really want to have a go at. Will post the results here as they become available.

Remote Screen Grabber

As promised: A Remote Windows Mobile Screen Grabber

One of the things I tried out during the development of this code to send mouse events to the device. When the user clicked the desktop screen with the device screen capture, a mouse message would be sent to the device via a different remote call. Although a bit crude, it was possible to remotely control the device (with some notable exceptions...). So this set my mind in motion (again) and now I'm writing a streamed version of the RAPI DLL so that it accepts commands from the desktop (such as mouse messages and even keyboard presses) and returns device screens to the desktop. I will post the code when it is ready (and working).

Interview

If you are interested to know a little bit more abut me, take a look at Christopher Fairbairn's blog. Thank you for this, Chris!

Windows Mobile Screen Capture

While waiting for Vista SP1 to hit the MSDN downloads section, I decided to investigate a little bit on an issue that has caught my curiosity time and again: remote capturing of the device screen. There are lots of products on the market that will do this for you, but the question of how it is done kept my curiosity alive.

Searching the net for source code samples turned nothing (blame Live and Google). The best approach I got was from a CodeProject article but the proposed GDI method does not work on Windows Mobile because the CAPTUREBLT flag is not supported. This means that I needed another solution.

GAPI seemed to be a very good candidate. It has a very simple API and I had used it in the past, but it is now declared deprecated by Microsoft and I was prompted to use Direct Draw instead. Willing to learn a bit more about this technology, I decided to give it a go and spent a couple of hours reading through MSDN docs to figure out how this can be done. As it turned out, it's very simple.

To capture the device screen using Direct Draw you need to follow these simple steps (I will write an article on this illustrating a desktop tool to capture the device screen via RAPI):

1. Initialize Direct Draw using the DirectDrawCreate function using NULL as the first parameter.
2. Set the cooperative level to DDSCL_NORMAL. This is enough for accessing the primary surface in read-only mode.
3. Create the primary surface using this code.
4. Get the surface's HDC and use it to create a compatible DC.
5. Create a compatible bitmap using the screen dimensions and select it to the compatible DC.
6. Blit from the surface DC to the compatible DC using BitBlt.
7. Done! The compatible bitmap now contains the device's screen capture.

I wrote this using a DIBSection in order to marshal it via a RAPI call and was able to deserialize it on the desktop and display the device screen capture. I'm planning to use this same marshalling technique to implement a remote file browser using the device's own system image list.

Stay tuned for the article!

Vista SP1 around the corner

According to this, Vista SP1 goes RTM today. I really want to install the SP1 and check the improvements it has in store for me. I have to tell you that Vista was a bit of a let-down when it refused to run eVC3 and eVC4 (I don't care about VS 2003). Microsoft's Virtual PC was also disappointing because it does not support USB, so I had to resort to a third-party VM (Parallels) to get a USB 1.1 emulation. Note that I do not expect that SP1 will add support for the eVC compilers, but I do expect to see some improvements in overall speed and especially when getting out of sleep mode. My Asus VX2 does not always wake up correctly and some drivers may not start correctly. The worst situation happened when the temperature control died after sleeping and the system overheated. I knew what happened because the whole thing shut down abruptly. So I'm really interested in seeing some improvements.

Remote File Viewer

A few days ago a Pocket PC Developer Network forum reader asked for a RAPI remote file viewer (like the one that ships with Visual Studio). I know that OpenNETCF has a free library to support this, but I decided to reinvent the wheel just for the fun of it. The (still crude) result is here. There are a few interesting points to note (especially for the beginner) like how the returned array of CE_FILE_DATA structures is read into a list. Adding file upload and download features should be a snap, now.

WTL on MSDN Magazine

This helps explain why I'm a WTL addict. Shame you don't see articles like these for Windows Mobile...

The collapsible toolbar

Here is an interesting challenge: implement the behavior of this collapsible toolbar. I'm wondering if this can be done by reusing the shell's toolbar control or if the whole thing needs a custom implementation. I will investigate an post back my findings.

After a bit of a rush trying to amend my own lack of testing before publishing new product releases (I should know better at 42...) I will also start looking at what it takes to implement the "Consumer Templates-less" OLE DB library for Windows CE (and Win32, why not?).

DBPROP_SSCE_TEMPFILE_MAX_SIZE

Never set this property to zero - SQL Compact Edition will not open your database... Yes, I just got my hands really dirty with this one.

New year, new life

This is what we say in Portugal: "Ano novo, vida nova" - "New year, new life" meaning that the turn of the year is a great time to ponder about last year and make the changes for the new one. Focusing deeper on less things is definitely something I will do this year. I just created a new blog for all the issues that pertain to my work at Primeworks and will keep this for all the other stuff, especially the native code stuff.

The community project that I chose to focus on is to create a replacement for the ATL OLE DB Consumer Templates. More and more I see native code developers looking for an easier way to access SQL Compact Edition databases from C++, and my solution for tweaking the PPC 2003 SDK header files does not feel right. Besides, Microsoft does not ship the Consumer Templates header files anymore so this must mean that this code is not supported (but is it licensed?). Developing a new library for OLE DB on devices will surely be an interesting challenge and will keep me busy writing code and publishing articles throughout 2008.

Once again, thank you Microsoft for the fifth MVP award!