One of my favorite Windows Mobile applications has been Bing (the application formerly known as “Live Search”).  This application has saved my bacon on more than one occasion when travelling on business or vacation. The ability to search for vital resources, wherever I am, like the closest Starbucks has been invaluable to me.

While Live Search was great, the UI was a little clunky and was not developed with capacitive screens and the corresponding touch navigation in-mind. Capacitive screens while more sensitive to touch, have a larger minimum hit target size. Actually comparing Live Search to the new Bing is a good example of how an application designed for a resistive screen has been updated to also work with capacitive screens.

The usability has greatly improved. For example to starting navigating to the nearest Starbucks, you:

• From the Bing home page, Tap ‘Speak’ and say ‘Starbucks’

• Select the ‘Starbucks’ you want to go to

• Tap the Car icon for driving directions

• Tap on ‘Navigate’ (If you are on foot, select the ‘Walk’ tab for walking directions.)

Immediately a route is calculated for you and Silicon Sally is telling you where to go. Yes ‘telling you’, with voice directions! This is a huge improvement over Live Search that had text only turn-by-turn directions. In the Bing settings, you can specify if you want to route via the shortest or fastest route. You can also configure Bing to consider real-time traffic conditions when calculating your route. 

Now featuring ‘auto-rerouting’! Live Search would prompt you will a demoralizing ‘Are you lost? Would you like to reroute from here?’ prompt whenever you deviated from your planned route. Bing for mobile smartly just tells you that it is ‘rerouting’ and updates your driving directions based on your current location.

All the great features of Live Search are still here like quick access to locally playing movies and show times.

You can install Bing for mobile from the Marketplace for Windows Phone here.

More information here.

Enjoy!

Mike

Update: I've updated the sample to be independent of the '\Program Files' string. Also, the sample now supports installing onto a Storage Card.

A popular sample for demonstrating how to install application dependencies via embedded CAB files is MultiCAB Install. With this pattern you can distribute dependant cab files via a single container CAB. “Can apps be distributed via Windows Marketplace for Mobile using this?”,you ask. Yes they can.

Installing SQL Server Compact dependencies is a good fit for this pattern. I have updated the sample here customized to distribute the latest SQL Server Compact for Windows Mobile devices.

The sample checks if SQL Server Compact 3.5 is installed (See IsSQLCEUpdateRequired() in mcsetup.cpp) and if not, launches the multicab EXE which installs each dependant cab in sequence. (See the multicab whitepaper included in the sample for an in-depth explanation of how it works.)

How does the sample check to see if v3.5 is installed? It checks the registry for the following entry:

This this exists, then installation of the SQLCE cabs is skipped. Note that this registry key only exists if SQLCE has been installed via a CAB file. That is, this registry key does not exist of SQLCE is in ROM. As of this writing, 3.5 (SP1 or SP2) is not distributed in ROM. See here for a list of OS and corresponding SQLCE versions: Description of the various build versions of SQL Server Compact Edition.

The sample does not do version checking on the binaries. Therefore it does not detect if you are upgrading from SQLCE 3.5 SP1 to SP2. The way it is written now, it will not update the binaries to SP2. This sample does address the popular scenario of updating an ‘off the shelf’ device with the latest version of SQL Server Compact.

More SQL Server Compact Links: Mike

I was developing a few themes for Standard and Professional devices (using the Windows Phone Custom Theme Generator tool to get me started) and found that when installing the CAB on Standard devices, I would get the following error:

Normally to fix this error, you would edit the .INF file and add BuildMax=0xE0000000 to the CEDevice section as follows (See here for explanation of BuildMax):

[CEDevice]
VersionMin = 3.0
VersionMax = 100.0
BuildMax=0xE0000000

In this case, I did not have an .INF file since the CAB was generated by the Theme Generator. Doing a Bing search, I found a great tool (Benoit Thonnart's MSCEInf) that helps with the process of creating a .INF file from a CAB file and extracting files from the CAB with the true filenames. Using this tool, I created the .INF file, edited it, and then recreated the CAB file using the .INF file and CABWIZ.EXE. MSCEinf’s feature of extracting the true filename saves a lot of time, saving you the drudgery of renaming the files, as specified in the _setup.xml file, by hand.  (When CABWIZ creates the CAB, it converts the filenames to 8.3 names).

Step-by-Step guide:

• Create dedicated destination directory.
• Copy MSCEInfEn to this directory.
• Create .INF file. 
  • Start MSCEInfEn.EXE
    • Open the CAB file
    • Click on the icon in upper left, ‘Save INF File rebuilt’ to save .INF file.
• Extract files from CAB, using the true filenames
  • Using MSCEInfEn,  turn Off ‘Use Folders’
    • Click 5^th button from left ‘Extract Filenames’ (should see icon with red X through it).
  • Using MSCEInfEn,  extract files
    • Click 4^th button from left ‘Extract CAB files with original names in a folder’.
    • Click ‘Extract’ and select the destination directory.
• At this point you should have the files of your theme / application and the .INF file in the destination directory.
• Modify .INF file
  • Open .INF file saved in Step 1 and add the following line below [CEStrings]
    • [CEDevice]
      BuildMax=0xE0000000
  • Save .INF file
• Rebuild CAB file.
  • Start a Command Line. (Start | Run | cmd)
  • Change to the destination directory.
  • Using CABWIZ.EXE recreate the cab file with the following command:
    • Cabwiz <filename>.inf
    • You may see a warning regarding AddReg, this can be ignored.
• Test the CAB file.

Thanks,

Mike

Thanks,

Mike

I’ve had a couple of clients that ran into a problem where their SMS Message interceptor would fail to fire. (For an introduction to this pretty cool technology see here.) This was a hard to track down problem, because the interceptor would work on some devices, and the emulator, but not on a handful of devices. Because this worked on several devices, it seemed the code was without errors.

We resolved this by determining if any of the existing SMS interceptors were interfering with this one. SMS Interceptors fire in a chain with each one handing off to the next. That is they should hand-off. If you are implementing a native code interceptor using IMailRuleClient, you can stop the message processing by setting the handled flag to MRC_HANDLED_DONTCONTINUE. This prevents any further processing of the message. However, this flag should ONLY be used if the message you are receiving is private to your application / interceptor. If other interceptors could possibly process the message, you should set the handled flag to MRC_HANDLED_CONTINUE or MRC_NOTHANDLED. For managed code, if you would like the message to be available to other interceptor applications, create the MessageInterceptorinstance passing the InterceptionAction.Notify enumeration value to the MessageInterceptor constructor.

You can test for interfering interceptors by going to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Inbox\Svc\SMS\Rules] and set each rule to ‘0’ until the problem goes away. The last rule you change to ‘0’ before the problem goes away will be the problematic rule. Note that you need to soft reset the device after changing the registry key.

For example:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Inbox\Svc\SMS\Rules]

"{27E9801F-330B-4c6a-A7BF-A670D8C53C5D}"=dword:00000001

"{E85FD9C3-4F5E-4c75-8C21-0F850274DEF5}"=dword:00000001 <-
Change to 0 to test

Once you have located the problematic rule, you can get more information on it (for example, the DLL name) by searching for the GUID underneath HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID.

Thanks,

Mike

Some developers are reporting a problem with the PNG icon not displaying in the Start screen.The usual symptom is that it does not show up immediately after installation but is seen after a device reset. This problem occurs if following the static cab method from the blog post: Using Custom Icons in Windows Mobile 6.5. I can reproduce this pretty consistently by installing again after initially installing. (During this process the first installation is uninstalled.) The static method does not use a setup DLL, but instead uses CAB file directives that are easily specified using Visual Studio to define the installation destination, files to be installed, the program shortcut, and any necessary registry keys.

So why is this happening?

For the PNG file to be displayed, the following sequence must take place, the next step dependant on the next:

1. Copy the PNG File to the destination directory
2. Create the registry key pointing to the PNG file
3. Create the program shortcut

When the shortcut is created the shell will:

1. Use the shortcut (.lnk) file specified in step 3 above, and look up the registry key specified in step 2 above. The registry key needs to exist for this step to succeed.
2. Open the PNG file, based on the registry key, and cache the Start screen icon.
3. If you look at the _setup.xml that is included CAB file, you can see the order of events:

               1:
              <
              characteristic
              type
              ="%CE11%"
              translation
              ="install"
              >
            

               2:
              <
              characteristic
              type
              ="MakeDir"
              />
            

               3:
              <
              characteristic
              type
              ="SMS
Intercept.lnk"
              translation
              ="install"
              >
            

               4:
              <
              characteristic
              type
              ="Shortcut"
              >
            

               5:
              <
              parm
              name
              ="Source"
              value
              ="%InstallDir%\sms
Intercept.exe"
              translation
              ="install"
              />
            

               6: ...

               7:
              <
              characteristic
              type
              ="Registry"
              >
            

               8:
              <
              characteristic
              type
              ="HKLM\Security\Shell\StartInfo\Start\SMS
Intercept.lnk"
              >
            

               9:
              <
              parm
              name
              ="Icon"
              value
              ="%InstallDir%\AppIcon.png"
              datatype
              ="string"
              translation
              ="install"
              />
            

               10:
              </
              characteristic
              >
            

Note that the instructions to create the shortcut appear sooner in the file than those for the creation of the registry key. In most cases, the timing is such that despite this order, the registry key is in place by the time the shortcut cut is actually created. If the registry key pointing to the location of the PNG file does not exist when the shortcut is created, the PNG icon will not be created.

Unfortunately the order of these events cannot be changed in the Visual Studio project or by reordering the directives in the .INF file.

The workaround is to append the XML for the shortcut creation to the CAB file. This will ensure that the shortcut creation is the last instruction to be processed. You can do this by following these steps:

1. Remove the shortcut directive from your Smart Device CAB file project in Visual Studio.
2. Modify the following XML (lines 4 and 6) to match your application:

               1:
              <
              characteristic
              type
              ="FileOperation"
              >
            

               2:
              <
              characteristic
              type
              ="%CE11%"
              translation
              ="install"
              >
            

               3:
              <
              characteristic
              type
              ="MakeDir"
              />
            

               4:
              <
              characteristic
              type
              ="SMS
Intercept.lnk"
              translation
              ="install"
              >
            

               5:
              <
              characteristic
              type
              ="Shortcut"
              >
            

               6:
              <
              parm
              name
              ="Source"
              value
              ="%InstallDir%\sms
Intercept.exe"
              translation
              ="install"
              />
            

               7:
              </
              characteristic
              >
            

               8:
              </
              characteristic
              >
            

               9:
              </
              characteristic
              >
            

               10:
              </
              characteristic
              >
            

1. Save this to a file: shortcut.xml
2. Get the command line used by CABWIZ to build your CAB file. We are going to use this to build a Post Build step.
   1. Build your CAB file project.
   2. Open the Output window in Visual Studio and you should see something like:

Building file 'C:\Projects\sms Intercept\sms Intercept\sms Intercept\CAB Static\Static CAB\Debug\StaticCAB.cab'...

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\smartdevices\sdk\sdktools\cabwiz.exe"
     "C:\Projects\sms Intercept\sms Intercept\sms Intercept\CAB Static\Static CAB\Debug\StaticCAB.inf"
     /dest "C:\Projects\sms Intercept\sms Intercept\sms Intercept\CAB Static\Static CAB\Debug\"
     /err CabWiz.log

3. Modify your Visual Studio main application project, to include a post build event. (Project | Properties | Build Event) (Ideally we would do this as part of building the CAB file, but Smart Device CAB projects do not include pre or post build events.)
   1. Paste in the command line with the switch (/postxml) to add the shortcut.xml file into the Post Build event command line:

      "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\smartdevices\sdk\sdktools\cabwiz.exe"
           "C:\Projects\sms Intercept\sms Intercept\sms Intercept\CAB Static\Static CAB\Debug\StaticCAB.inf"
           /postxml "C:\Projects\sms Intercept\sms Intercept\sms Intercept\CAB Static\Static CAB\Shortcut.XML"
           /dest "C:\Projects\sms Intercept\sms Intercept\sms Intercept\CAB Static\Static CAB\Debug\"
           /err CabWiz.log

4. Now when you build the main project, your CAB file will also be built, with instructions in the XML in the correct order.

The static cab project in the PNG Start screen sample with the above implemented can be found here.

I realize this is not the cleanest solution – but it will resolve the problem of the PNG icon sometimes not being displayed if using the static CAB deployment method. At least, you still don’t have to write / maintain any C++ code to support the PNG icon.

Enjoy-

Mike

A new release of the Windows Marketplace for Mobile requirements went live today. Many developers should be happy with change in the PNG Start screen icon requirements. Prior to today, you were required to include three PNG files (one for each possible DPI) in your installation CAB file. Today, this requirement is one (90x90) icon.

The three icon requirement, necessitated a setup DLL to dynamically copy the appropriate PNG according to the device DPI. Now the setup is much easier – only requiring CAB file definitions and no C++ code. 

For more information see the following updated blog post: Using Custom Icons in Windows Mobile 6.5 and FAQ: Start Screen PNG Icon FAQ.

Mike

If you are new to Windows Mobile development or are interested in a consolidated list of resources, check out the list I’ve put together here: Resources: Windows Mobile Development.

This list was easy to put together using Deliciouslinkrolls (mmmm linkrolls…). If you have Windows Mobile links to recommend, please add me to your Delicious network. I use the tag: windowsmobile.

Mike