Windows Mobile Developer Network

The long-awaited Windows Mobile 6 SDKs have just been released by Microsoft. With the new SDKs we are presented with a new taxonomy for Windows Mobile devices:
- Windows Mobile for Smartphone = Windows Mobile Standard
- Windows Mobile for Pocket PC = Windows Mobile Classic
- Windows Mobile for Pocket PC Phone Edition = Windows Mobile Professional

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I plan to attend MEDC 2007 in Vegas, but haven’t registered yet. To my relief I found out that the early registration ($400 off) is still open. It is open until February 23rd, so if you plan to go, don’t wait too long to register!

I really look forward to visiting this conference. MEDC 2006 was the best developer conference I have ever attended and MEDC 2007 is promising to be even more interesting. You can find a report about MEDC 2006 in our archives, “MEDC 2006 Rocks!”

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The newly-renamed SQL engine from Microsoft is now available for download in the first release candidate version (RC1).

SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition was previously named SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition during the product development phase. Customers have communicated to Microsoft through the pre-release community technology preview (CTP) program and other channels that this product name may cause potential confusion with other database product names in the industry. Microsoft has taken this feedback seriously and has accordingly changed the official product name.

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The latest version of the operating system that supports our beloved Pocket PCs and Smartphones has just been released. Note that this is not Windows Mobile 6.0 yet. The differences between Windows CE 6, Windows Mobile and Windows XP Embedded are clearly explained by Mike Hall in this Channel 9 video.

Windows® Embedded CE 6.0 is a componentized operating system designed from the ground up to power small footprint devices and help developers get them to market fast. Choosing from a wide variety of technology components and pre-existing templates, you can quickly build hard real-time commercial and consumer electronics devices, such as:
- Set-top boxes
- Thin clients
- Digital media adapters
- Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phones
- Navigation devices
- Medical devices
- Portable media players
- Home gateways
- Digital cameras
- Networked digital televisions
- PDAs

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Here is an interesting alternative to C#, VB and C++. ArianeSoft has just released a new programming environment to help in the development of mobile applications.

Pocket Programming Language is designed for both professional programmers and beginners. Its programming language includes the best elements of C, Pascal, and Basic. While the program can be used to develop business demos or any type of software application, its powerful game development tools make it ideal for creating challenging games and interactive demos.

Professional programmers will appreciate Pocket Programming Language’s complete integrated development environment (IDE) for Windows, including a project manager, full source code syntax highlighting, a file explorer, and an easy-to-use Visual Form Builder. As with any high-end language compiler, you can profile your code, and visually debug and trace variables from within the IDE. The multilevel visual game editor lets you see your game on the screen, as you’re designing it.

Read more here.

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Alexander Dovgaluk has created the smallest program for Pocket PC I have ever seen. How big is the program? Only 352 bytes. Despite of its small size it has rich functionality. Well, not really. Still the program is almost as good as a classic “Hello World”. It salutes you with a message box saying “Msg”.

The program features a few tricks such as moving code to the MZ header and using SysCall directly for calling system APIs. Interested in details? Download the program or see the complete ARM assembly language listing below:
[code:1:a76dbe5ecc]
CODE32

EXPORT |Main|

AREA |.text|, CODE, ARM

|Main| PROC

stmfd sp!, {r0-r8,lr}

add r0, sp, #4
str r0, [sp]
mov r0, #0
add r1, pc, #0x18
mov r2, r1
mov r3, #0x40
mov lr, pc
ldr pc, |MessageBoxW|
add sp, sp, #0x20

ldmfd sp!, {pc}

ENDP

|MessageBoxW| dcd (0xF0010000 - (0x11 << 8 + 0x32) * 4)

|msg| dcb "m", 0, "s", 0, "g", 0, 0, 0

END
[/code:1:a76dbe5ecc]

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Gistek has just announced the first version of NGui, an XML/LUA/WTL framework to create user interface on Windows and Windows CE (PocketPC). Quoting from Gistek’s site:

NGui is a C++ library to enable the easy creation of a complete modern application with dynamic modal or modeless dialog boxes. It comes with a binding to lua, a compact but powerful javascript like interpreter (http://www.lua.org). Graphical user interface are created by a combinaison of xml for the static description of the various GUI elements (gadgets) and lua code for user interaction (behavior).

Ngui also has an plug-in extension mechanism to dynamically loads a dll that defines one or more gadgets (control that have a window), those gadget are inserted into the user interface like normal one, and lua commands defined in the dll are added to the interpretor.

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Starline Software announced the release of its SpiderUI Developer’s Suite for .NET developers who use Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005. This product is a collection of navigational and user interface controls that can be used in applications for Pocket PC devices.

Main features include:
- SpiderUI – Navigational Control nominated “2005 Best Software”
- Numeric Keypad – Display Skins & Mathematic Support
- Letter Recognition TextBox – Input Always Visible
- History TextBox – Individual or Collective History Lists with Tool Tip Feature
- All UI controls support “Smart Placement”

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Now that the Widcomm Bluetooth SDK is available free of charge, it is a good time to have a first look a it.

In this article, I show how to develop a very simple device and services enumerator for my old faithful iPAQ 2210.

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Microsoft has just released the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition Access Database Synchronizer (ADS) CTP. This product allows for RDA-type of communications between a SQL Everywhere database and an Access database on a desktop computer via ActiveSync.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition Access Database Synchronizer provides a way to synchronize data between Microsoft Access database on a desktop and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition database on a device.

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