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The Windows Mobile 5.0 SDKs shipped with a number of emulator images, and additional form factors were made available in separate packages at a later date when they were introduced with AKU2. Below is the list of emulator images which will ship with the Windows Mobile 6 SDK:-

Windows Mobile 6 Standard

• Windows Mobile 6 Standard (176×220)


• Windows Mobile 6 Standard Landscape QVGA (320×240)


• Windows Mobile 6 Standard QVGA (240×320)

Windows Mobile 6 Professional

• Windows Mobile 6 Classic (No Phone) (240×320)


• Windows Mobile 6 Professional (240×320)


• Windows Mobile 6 Professional Square (240×240)


• Windows Mobile 6 Professional Square QVGA (320×320)


• Windows Mobile 6 Professional Square VGA (480×480)


• Windows Mobile 6 Professional VGA (480×640)

Except for the square form-factors all of the Professional emulator images support screen rotation, the emulator rotates the device skin in place so that the screen is always shown in the correct orientation on the development computer.

Turns out the SDKs haven’t been abducted by aliens, James Pratt reveals the story here on the Windows Mobile blog. So if you missed them you’ll have to wait until 1st March for their official release.

The good news is that there will be an update to the SDKs due out on May 1st with new emulator images, additional samples and documentation improvements. Lets hope that all my bug reports submitted on documentation errors in the current release are resolved in that release.

At first glance it doesn’t appear there are any new goodies in the managed code libraries for Windows Mobile 6. But wait, there are – SystemState has gained a few new properties which allow you to monitor the state of:-

• BluetoothStateA2DPConnected


• BluetoothStateDiscoverable


• BluetoothStateHandsFreeAudio


• BluetoothStateHandsFreeControl


• BluetoothStateHardwarePresent


• BluetoothStatePowerOn

and

• WiFiStateConnected


• WiFiStateConnecting


• WiFiStateHardwarePresent


• WiFiStateNetworksAvailable


• WiFiStatePowerOn

Another noticable enhancement, which isn’t really part of the managed APIs, is that the dialog for Task items (Task.ShowDialog()) is now much more useful on Smartphone (sorry Standard Edition) in that it has an Edit option with the ability to set properties such as Priority, Status, Reminder etc. These have always been present in Pocket PC (oops Professional Edition) and sorely lacking from Smartphone prior to WM6.

Following Daniel’s post announcing the appearance of the Windows Mobile 6 SDKs on Microsoft’s download site, I headed off to get the SDKs and start poking around. A common question I can see arising is how to detect if you are running on WM6 from your managed code. The answer is to use the System.Environment.OSVersion.Version property. If your device is running WM6 this will report back 5.2 (for the emulators the full build is 5.2.318 but the build numbers are likely to change by the time real devices emerge). In contrast WM5.0 devices report back 5.1 (5.1.1700 for the original 5.0 SDK emulators). Both platforms are running on top of Windows CE 5.0, and not Windows Embedded CE 6.0 which is currently available, and understandably this can cause some confusion when the OS and marketing versions don’t exactly tie up. The .1 and .2 minor versions are special Windows CE releases for Windows Mobile which are not available to generic CE platform builders. You may remember a similar thing occuring with Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition which had an OS version of 4.21.

You’ve probably not managed to miss the barrage of reports announcing the upcoming Windows Mobile 6. One in particular caught my eye which was by Loke Uei on new developer features:-

http://blogs.msdn.com/lokeuei/archive/2007/02/07/windows-mobile-6-what-s-in-it-for-developers.aspx

On the device the main highlights are the latest framework and SQL Server CE components in ROM, and two new APIs:-