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So, I’ve heard a few requests for VS2005 support for the SDF. The reason we don’t have this fully integrated into VS2005 yet is because the extensibility model is significantly changed from VS2003, and since it’s a Beta product is still changing. Therefore we’ll have a fully integrated installer nearer to the release of VS2005.

In the mean time you can pull the dlls off of a machine with VS2003 and SDF v1.3 installed, or grab them here in a zip file. These are the exact same dlls as you’ll get in the v1.3 setup. Just to set your expectations you wont get automatic deployment of the SDF cab files (these are included in the zip for manual deployment). You also won’t get the full designer experience – if you use any of our forms controls you’ll have to add it through code.

If you encounter any issues using this version from within VS2005, be sure to file a bug report, and make sure you tell us what version of the .NETCF you are targetting (1 or 2) and what platform type (Pocket PC 2003, Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone etc) and which version of VS2005, though I wouldn’t recommend using anything prior to Beta 2 now it is available.

You can simulate user activity on your touch-screen device by using the mouse_event API to send the system screen taps. There are a number of reasons you might want to do this from testing your application through to automating some third-party application, the following is example code to send a tap (and release) to any screen co-ordinate:-

[DllImport(“coredll”)]
private static extern void mouse_event(MOUSEEVENTF dwFlags, int dx, int dy, int dwData, int dwExtraInfo);

[Flags()]
private enum MOUSEEVENTF
{
MOVE = 0x1, /* mouse move */
LEFTDOWN = 0x2, /* left button down */
LEFTUP = 0x4, /*left button up */
RIGHTDOWN = 0x8, /*right button down */
RIGHTUP = 0x10, /*right button up */
MIDDLEDOWN = 0x20, /*middle button down */
MIDDLEUP = 0x40, /* middle button up */
WHEEL = 0x800, /*wheel button rolled */
VIRTUALDESK = 0x4000, /* map to entrire virtual desktop */
ABSOLUTE = 0x8000, /* absolute move */
TOUCH = 0x100000, /* absolute move */
}

public void SendTap(int x, int y)
{
mouse_event(MOUSEEVENTF.LEFTDOWN | MOUSEEVENTF.ABSOLUTE, (int)((65535 / Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Width) * x), (int)((65535 / Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Height) * y), 0, 0);
mouse_event(MOUSEEVENTF.LEFTUP, 0, 0, 0, 0);
}

The mouse_event method is fairly straight-forward, one thing to notice is that it doesn’t accept screen co-ordinates but rather a value from 0 to FFFF in each direction, where FFFF, FFFF is the bottom right corner.

I’m sure I don’t need to mention that Microsoft recently released Beta 2 of their Visual Studio 2005 tools. Alongside this release a redistributable version of the .NETCF v2.0 runtime is available so that you can download to your devices and test code you can download the package here.

Ilya Tumanov posted some useful information on the release on the newsgroup:-

“Visual Studio 2005 download is not required; installation of NETCF V2 Beta
2 won’t break existing VS 2003 and/or NETCF V1.
It also works side by side with CF V1 on device (in ROM or RAM).

If you’re planning to install VS 2005 Beta 2 later on, you would have to
uninstall NETCF V2 prior to VS installation.

We would appreciate if you try your CF V1 application(s) under V2 and
report incompatibilities so we could fix them.

Here’s how to run existing V1 applications under V2:

1. Install V2 on to the device (via Active Sync or copy CAB file to the
device and click on it).
2. Create a configuration file named <App_Name>.exe.config as follows:

<configuration>
<startup>
<supportedRuntime version=”v2.0.5056″/>
</startup>
</configuration>

To try application without V1 compatibility enabled, the following section
can be added:

<runtime>
  <compatibilityversion major=”2″ minor=”0″/>
  </runtime>

To run V2 application in V1 compatibility mode (for example if V2 app uses
V1 component), section can be changed as follows:

<runtime>
  <compatibilityversion major=”1″ minor=”0″/>
  </runtime>

3. Copy configuration file to the application folder.
4. Run application as usual.

Please report problems with installation and/or compatibility to this NG.
For CAB problems, please attach CAB log file “Microsoft .NET CF
2.0.LOG.TXT” which can be found in device’s root folder. Thanks.”

Even if you are not currently evaluating the Visual Studio 2005 tools, I would recommend downloading these runtimes and testing your existing code – there are a number of cases where behaviour has changed in v2.0 but as you can see above you can run an app with v1.0 compiled code in compatibility mode.

Time to provide a little balance to the previous piece on SetPowerRequirement for Smartphone which looked at the scenario of ensuring the backlight remained on. You might also want to manually turn off the backlight (or another peripherial) to save power. You can do this with SetDevicePower. You pass in the identifier of the hardware device (“BKL1:” being the backlight on most devices), and a power state – thus the backlight can be powered off with the following:-

SetDevicePower(“BKL1:”, POWER_NAME, DevicePowerState.D4);

POWER_NAME is passed in to the flags argument to indicate that the first argument represents a device name. The Power states run from D0 full power to D4 power off. And without further ado, the P/Invoke:- 

public enum DevicePowerState : int
{
Unspecified = -1,
D0 = 0, // Full On: full power, full functionality
D1, // Low Power On: fully functional at low power/performance
D2, // Standby: partially powered with automatic wake
D3, // Sleep: partially powered with device initiated wake
D4, // Off: unpowered
}

private const int POWER_NAME = 0x00000001;

[DllImport(“coredll”)]
private static extern int SetDevicePower(
string pvDevice,
int dwDeviceFlags,
DevicePowerState DeviceState);