A few months ago I wrote some code that really made me appreciate the new language feature in C#: Anonymous Methods. I decided to turn it into a sample application that creates a web request to www.google.com and downloads it when you push a button… asynchronously (that means the UI does not hang while the application is downloading). Prior to C# 2.0, doing a web request and download the content asynchronously was several hundred lines of sloppy spaghetti code: you need to implement callbacks, cleanup, error handling, state maintenance, etc. A lot of developers, myself included, would “cheat” and wrap synchronous calls in a thread to fake asynchronous requests (this is not ideal for performance).

The beauty of anonymous methods is that the compiler’s syntactic sugar handles a lot of the aforementioned for the developer very elegantly in the background. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is the follow-up installment #2 on device emulator configuration.  You may want to read installment #1 first.

I often need to test our code across various versions and SKUs of Windows Mobile.  For instance, I need to test one feature across WM 5.0 Smartphone, WM 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition, WM 6.0 Standard, WM 6.0 Professional and, of course, the newer WM 6.1 SKUs.

When testing, you often want to use a hard/cold booted device for the most reproducible results.  Cold booting and then reconfiguring a bunch of devices is super time consuming.  Even if using the device emulator, configuration can be time consuming. Read the rest of this entry »

The following is the first of 2 installments that describe how I use Windows Mobile Device Emulators. This installment covers setup and basic use while the second installment covers configuration.

A lot of people test and demo Windows Mobile devices using actual devices. This works fine for most scenarios. However, there are some distinct advantages to using device emulators:

• The device emulators are free as they come with the Windows Mobile SDKs.
• If you use a device emulator for your demo, you don’t need to use an Elmo overhead projector to show what’s happening on the device.
• You can pre-configure a device emulator, save the pre-configured state and quickly “reset” the emulator back to the pre-configured state. This is a real time saver for both demoing and testing.
• You can test across multiple versions of the Windows Mobile Operating System simultaneously on one PC

If I’ve convinced you that the device emulator is worth setting up, follow these steps. Read the rest of this entry »

For those going to the upcoming TechEd North America 2008, IT Pro Conference, June 10-13 in Orlando Florida my Enterprise Mobile colleague Patrick Salmon has two sessions just about SCMDM:

My other Enterprise Mobile colleague Doug Field, is managing the Hands-On-Lab for SCMDM as well!

Find more information on TechEd 2008 here.

There is also a ton of sessions on Windows Mobile and Windows Mobile 6.1 that could be very interesting!

Marco Nielsen

Another great article in the current issue of Smartphone/PocketPC Magazine from my colleague Patrick Salmon. Check it out here:

http://www.pocketpcmag.com/cms/_archives/Jun08/SystemCenterDevice

Good round-up of knowledge skills and necessary to get started with SCMDM. Provides an excellent overview of the technology and why it is important as well!

Marco Nielsen