Mark Arteaga

Every wanted to get GDI+ functionality on Windows Mobile?  Well Alex has just finished a new article for the community site on using GDI+ on Windows Mobile devices.  Here are a few images on what can be done:

Different Brush Styles

Different Pen Styles

GDI+ with Ink Capture

We have just released a new product called Padarn Web Server for Windows CE.  What exactly is it?  Well it's a very small-footprint ASP.NET Web Server built to run on Windows CE 5.0+.  Think about WIFI routers, set top boxes or any other embedded device that would need some sort of a web UI to configure it.  Or possibly you need to do some reporting or expose some services to configure the device remotely. With Padarn you can leverage your managed code experience and build web apps faster.  For example take a look here to display the device system information. Here is the source to display the device system info. Want to see other examples then check out www.padarn.net and check out the product page here.

<note>NONE TECH POST</note>

Some of you may or may not know that the majority of my work is done from my home office.  There are lots of advantages to this like saving on transportation cost (especially now since gas prices are so high) to being able to work either during the day or at night (coding mainly happens at night!). 

One of the biggest advantages I find is the amount of time I spend with my family like having lunch with them, walking my kids to school etc. Every so often I get little surprises and since it's Friday afternoon here is today's surprise I thought I would share

My son's favorite characters from the movie Cars sitting on my laptop.  Here is my favorite car

And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

At the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2007 conference, Steve Ballmer talks about building a mobile platform in the same way the desktop platform was built.  Check out the article here and some clips from the keynote.

Some pretty exciting things are happening in the world of mobile.  Facebook is adding it's platform to the Blackberry device and tightly integrate with the hardware, AOL launches a bunch of mobile services, Microsoft launches new services for mobile search. 

And some stats: US Mobile subscribers have reached 81% of the population (approx 240 million people), people are sending 1billion SMS messages per day in the US and wireless data revenues rose 63% from last year (CTIA Semi-Annual Wireless Industry Survey).  Wish we can get some Canadian stats but I'm sure it doesn't compare to our friends down south!

And I'm sure everyone has heard about the $240million dollar investment from Microsoft on Facebook.  That values Facebook at $15billion!

These are exciting times again! 

We have just released an update to our Popup Menu Control which resolves a few bugs our customers have found.  If you have never heard of the control then in short what it allows you to do is display a customized Context Menu in your .NET Compact Framework application.  By customized I mean showing icons, background images, background/foreground colours and owner drawn capabilities.  It's supported on both Windows Mobile and Windows CE. 

Here are a screen shot of what can possibly be done.

By setting the PopupMenuItem.OwnerDraw property to true, you as the developer have the option to customize the menu item however you like.  Here is a new sample I just created showing a gradient context menu:

Download the evaluation version and try out the samples.

In my previous post I left a hint on a new project I was working on which was this image:

After reading about Windows Live Barcode and seeing it was not available  at barcode.ideas.live.com I decided to look around to see if there was something available for .NET CF to create an application to decode these images on a Windows Mobile device using the built in camera.  Nothing was available except this JavaME implementation here.  So I ported that code to C# and now we have QRCode Library for .NET Compact Framework.

What is a QR Code?  Well, it is a two-dimensional barcode that should be decoded at high speeds.  QR stands for 'Quick Response'.

The image above was my test image (generated here) and here is the result running it on a Windows Mobile 5 device:

So my question was answered and it does work.  Next test was testing with an image using the CameraCaptureDialog to see if the library can decode an image taken with a device camera.  Here is the image:

And here is the result:

Although this was pretty exciting to be able to decode an image taken by the camera on the device (yes I think that's exciting :) it did take me about 5-7 tries before the image was actually decoded.  It wasn't until I changed the JPG Quality to 'SuperFine' was the image decoded.  So IMO for the regular user I don't think it's ready for 'prime time'.  Now my camera is only 1.3 mega pixels but new devices with 3.0 mega pixel cameras are now out which should help improve the image quality and the decoding success rate (time to upgrade my device!).

Another exciting part was decoding the image was pretty fast after the change I made I discussed in my previous post. 

So if you are interested in the project you can find all details here.  It is open source and we have added the source to our SVN Repository (main page is not updated but you can browse the source code).

BTW ... if you want to generate an QR Code using a web service check out Richard Jones post here.

Our September coding competition is now complete and the winner is FlowFx by Malcolm Hall.  Although it was the only entry I personally think it's a great entry and shows what developers can do with Windows Mobile and only the tip of the iceberg IMO.  Check out this product from ZenZui or the HTC Touch or the home screen of the Samsung SGH-i600 ... all very cool things you can do with the a Windows Mobile device!

So this month's theme ... gaming.   Check out the details on the community site and show everyone how much game you got!

We recently released Media Player Control for Windows CE and we have got a few requests asking if it works on Windows Mobile.  Unfortunately this product does not work on Windows Mobile. 

Today we have just released Media Player Control for Windows Mobile Beta 1 for all the Windows Mobile developers out there that want to easily add media to their .NET Compact Framework applications.

Here is a screen shot of the application playing a WMV trailer of Rush Hour 3

The product is currently in beta and if you would like to participate in the Beta the sign up instructions can be found here.