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I was quite surprised at an email I got from HTC Support today in regards to a specific device update:-

“Hello,

There will be no Windows Mobile 6.1 upgrade for any HTC Touch device.

Please do not reply to this email as this email address is not monitored for replies.

Best regards,

Carolin

HTC Europe”

The Windows Mobile client for Live Mesh is now available. You can download it from your device from http://m.mesh.com

I’ve just installed it onto my phone and have been taking a look. On the desktop the Mesh client is quite tightly integrated into the explorer shell – it adds an extra pane alongside your folder windows showing the status of your synchronised folders. On devices the same level of integration is not possible (nor is there the screen real-estate). Therefore the mobile Mesh client runs as a separate application allowing you to manage which folders are synchronised. If you select a folder it opens separately in File Explorer to show the contents, you don’t get any fancy icons to show the synchronisation status. The main menu in the Mesh client provides access to the members and news of that folder – the content you would normally see in the Mesh pane. This opens in an Internet Explorer window and is actually a mobile formatted version of the mesh web application. Also from the menu you can force a manual synchronisation and change the settings for automatic synchronisation.

In summary it is quite a simple client and does a good job of extending your Mesh files onto your mobile device. One of the key features is synchronisation of photos and it will automatically setup the My DocumentsMy Pictures folder to synchronise with a “Mobile Pictures” folder in your Mesh. Unfortunately this wasn’t immediately useful to me as I save photos to the storage card, but it’s simple enough to setup Synchronisation of any other folder from the device.

I needed to convert some files to PDF format today. While this is possible in Office 2007 products with a free add-in it isn’t an option in other applications. I have an XPS printer and a OneNote writer but no way to produce a PDF. There are a number of solutions available and in the past I’ve had problems with ones which looked promising but that don’t support Windows Vista. I stumbled across doPDF today and was very pleasantly surprised. It’s freeware, supports Windows Vista and, like all software should, it just works. I rarely need to produce PDF files but now I know I have a solution I can rely upon.

Fancy yourself as a mobile game developer and want to win loads of Motorola kit? If so the Motorola Developer Network (MOTODEV) have a game development contest for you! There are categories for both Java and Windows Mobile games, for Windows Mobile you could choose to write in native or managed code. It would be cool for the winning game to be written with the Compact Framework of course. The deadline is the 10th of August, full details are available here:-

http://developer.motorola.com/eventstraining/gamechallenge/

When your device is synchronised with ActiveSync (or Windows Mobile Device Center in Windows Vista) a number of device properties are written to the registry. This allows you to gather information on the device during a custom installation or from a desktop application. One of these properties is the version number of the device, the exact key is:-

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindows CE Services

The version is stored in a DWORD value called “DeviceVersion”, its contents look like this:-

0x1560105

As raw bytes it would be {0x5, 0x1, 0x56, 0x1 }. The first byte represents the major version number, the second is the minor version and the last two bytes together are the build number e.g. 0x156 = 342. Putting that all together shows that my connected device is returning version:

5.1.342

Which is exactly what I can see on the Settings > System > About screen for the device (which is a Pocket PC running Windows Mobile 5.0 AKU 3.0).

Daniel tagged me a couple of days ago and finally I’ve got round to posting. I’ve been enjoying some quality offline time over the Christmas break.

1. I’m in the process of writing a .NET book with Daniel and fellow MVP Andy.


2. I’m double jointed and can put my legs behind my head, but I’m getting a little rusty in my old age.


3. While trying to buy a practical car I was let down twice by a dealership, so I went elsewhere and got myself a much more impractical 2 seat convertible and have thoroughly enjoyed it.


4. Before studying Computer Science I briefly entered the world of bricks and mortar training as an architect.


5. I enjoy travelling to new places, this year I spent a month in Australia, somewhere I’d definitely like to revisit.

And finally to tag 5 new victims bloggers – Bill, Dave, Rob, João Paulo and John

You are going to hear this a few hundred times over the next 24 hours, so I may as well add another me too post. Visual Studio 2005 final release is available for download for MSDN subscribers. It’s only a matter of days now before it’s officially on the shelves.

http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2005/10/27/485665.aspx

First tasks after installing will be to make sure everything which worked on the various builds (My demo laptop is still running July CTP because I got my demo working on that build and was too frightened to break it!) installs and works with the release version. And I think it’s going to be a slow download as MSDN downloads are strangely busy this evening 🙂 So what are the chances it will have finished downloading by the morning?

Brad Abrams’ team at Microsoft have started a series of Webcasts around class library design. The introductory session is available on the site now with a further 13 sessions to follow. A chat session is scheduled to follow on the topic of each week, the first of which will be this Wednesday. There are some exciting topics coming up in the series so it’s definately something you should keep an eye out for. A full schedule is on the Designing .NET Class Libraries website:-

http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/programming/classlibraries/

Thanks to all your support and feedback so far we’ve reached 50,000 individual downloads of code and binaries here at OpenNETCF.org. We are also currently rolling together a number of bug fixes and a raft of new features into a v1.1 release of the Smart Device Framework – stay tuned for more details.

I followed Neil and Alex‘s lead and upgraded my blog to dasBlog too. Luckily because dasBlog is an evolution of BlogX the migration was pretty smooth. I may well tweak the theme slightly yet though because I miss my roadsign 🙂

I’ve also flashed my iPaq 2210 with the latest 1.10 ROM (Thanks to Ed at Pocket PC Thoughts for the heads up). This includes a number of previous patches, sadly it has .NETCF SP1, not SP2 so that will still require a RAM install. However doing a ROM flash is always a good time to clean out the crud so my iPaq is nice and tidy (for the moment at least)