In The Hand Ltd

Category: Windows Mobile

  • Retrieve IMEI Through TAPI

    Earlier I posted to the newsgroup a description of using Alex Feinman‘s Tapi Wrapper to retrieve the IMEI of the phone device. When I checked again, the specific required method is not included in the wrapper, however as Alex has made the line handles accessible it’s easy to tag functionality onto the library without re-inventing the wheel. I put together a VB example to P/Invoke the lineGetGeneralInfo method to retrieve information about the phone device. If you use this on a Smartphone device you may find it doesn’t work – this is because many Smartphone devices require signing to access many of the TAPI methods. I tested this on a HTC Phone Edition device


    TapiVBExample.zip (52.74 KB)


     

  • Windows Mobile 5.0 “Old Skool” Start Menu

    Personally I like the new icons based start menu in Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone, however some people have asked if it’s possible to revert to the old list view. The answer is yes, via a simple registry tweak. For this I’m using the Remote Registry Editor from VS2005. Locate the key


    HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftShellStartMenu


    Change the value “GridView” from 1 to 0. The change takes effect immediately when you next open the start menu. As with the large icons view the full 9 items are listed with the more option mapped to the left softkey. This always bugged me with SP2003 especially when a menu had 9 items with the 9th requiring a whole new page. You can change the value back to 1 for the new WM5 experience.

  • Windows Mobile Managed APIs Diagram

    During his session at MEDC, Robert Levy handed out copies of a cool class library diagram for the new Windows Mobile 5.0 managed APIs, thanks to Robert for allowing me to post the diagram here – simply print to a large sheet of paper and enjoy 🙂



    WM5APIs.gif (242.62 KB)

  • Windows Mobile 5.0 Managed APIs

    The much anticipated update to Windows Mobile has been announced by Bill Gates this morning. This new platform will be the first platform from Microsoft to include device specific managed APIs in ROM (separate from the .NET Compact Framework itself). These allow access to configuration, telephony, pocket outlook etc from managed code.


    But what about existing devices? To add to our existing PocketOutlook library we have produced a WindowsMobile suite which includes a large proportion of WindowsMobile 5.0 APIs for previous versions. More details are available here.


    As well as supporting older generations of Windows Mobile, the suite also supports Windows Mobile 5.0, and one library in particular InTheHand.WindowsMobile.Gps provides a managed wrapper around the native GPS API in Windows Mobile 5.0


    In due time the PocketOutlook library v1.7 will be released with an object model more closely aligned to Windows Mobile 5.0 APIs.

  • The great Media Player 10 Automation Challenge!

    Media Player 10 is the first device version to have an automation model. Previous versions could be controlled via some undocumented windows messages but that was about it. The Media Player 10 Mobile object model is COM based, so you can’t use it directly from .NETCF v1.0. I set about creating a wrapper months ago but it got left due to lack of time. However I’ve decided there is enough functionality available in it now for it to function. I’ve not had time to create a sample application, so your challenge if you choose to accept it (and I’ll be honest there isn’t a prize!) is to create something using the assembly.


    Because theres no support for hooking com events with a sink interface the wrapper exposes no events, also because there isn’t ActiveX hosting support you won’t get any UI – so this is useful for audio content only. The other big limitation is that you must have Media Player 10 on your device.


    Other than that feel free to have a play and see what fun you can have with it, any issues suggestions or cool creations you build with it please drop me an email or post a comment.


    Download InTheHand.MediaPlayer.zip

  • Open individual documents on Pocket PC

    The built in applications in Pocket PC follow a familiar model with a DocumentList screen listing files of that type, and then an “editor” screen for working with an individual document. If you launch a specific document programmatically it will open direct to that document, but when you close the app will continue to run returning to the document list. You can add the “-opendoc” argument to launch the application for that specific document and close completely once you’ve finished working with it. This allows you to more seamlessly use these applications from your own code and determine when they have completed. Using the Process class you would do:-


    Process p = Process.Start(“pword.exe”,”-opendoc “My Documentsmypocketwordfile.pwd”);


    This argument is supported by Notes, Pocket Word, Pocket Excel and Pocket Streets