With the recent announcement of Windows Embedded Handheld 8 it seems fitting to discuss something related to industrial and line-of-business applications which you can develop now on the Windows Phone platform.
I’ve released the first drop of 32feet.NET for Windows Phone 8 to our CodePlex site and NuGet. Because the programming model on Windows Phone (based on Windows Runtime StreamSockets) this is a separate package and doesn’t follow the programming model of the main 32feet.NET release. Windows Phone 8 supports Bluetooth programming out-of-the-box it is not straight-forward as it is build around the Windows Runtime Peer networking APIs but is different to the Windows 8 implementation. The aim of the 32feet library for Windows Phone is to simplify common tasks. This initial release adds the following features:-
- Strongly typed extension methods for ConnectAsync which accept service Guids or numerical port numbers
- BluetoothDevicePicker which offers an easy way for a user to select a device. Equivalent to the SelectBluetoothDeviceDialog in the core 32feet library.
- Common Bluetooth service Guids
- Bluetooth Barcode scanner sample. This sample app connects to a Motorola CS3070 scanner and allows input of Barcodes to the device screen. It should also work with other Bluetooth serial based scanners.
This is just a first release and we will be continuing to develop the library as well as add further localisation and samples. For example to demonstrate connecting to applications running on the desktop (Sorry not Windows Store apps currently). Your feedback is valuable so please visit the CodePlex project site to provide feedback.
There is a NuGet package available for the Windows Phone flavour of 32feet.NET to allow you to easily add it to your projects:-
In The Hand Ltd 