I attended the Oxford branch of the NextGen User Group meeting tonight (1st July) and heard two good talks on WCF and Dynamic Languages from Geff Lombardi and Ben Hall respectively. Details at of the event are here.  These and every other talk I have attended as a group member, have usually been relevant, well presented and informative. On top of that free stuff (swag) is usually given away! So if you lust after the must-have accessory from last years TechEd, books , T-Shirts with a geek flavour etc , it's the place to be!

I was also lucky enough tonight to be awarded a trophy for the "Best Presentation" given at the Oxford Branch over the past year, for the talks I gave on Windows Mobile Development. This was very flattering, so my thanks to all the people who attended the talks and gave feedback on my presentations.  It was nice to know my efforts were appreciated! I hope the talks I gave were useful.

The slides for the April 2008 talk and the July 2007 talk are available for download for anyone who is interested to find out more. The code samples for the 2008 talk will be available for download shortly.

The next talk is on Wed 6 August on Continuous Integration by Liam Westley. This is an increasingly significant issue in the development of fully testable and deployable enterprise applications. So if you are interested and in the Oxford area it may well be worth attending.

In a previous post I wrote about the security threats to smartphone devices following the release of a significant mobile device virus in the Far East. Its seems I am  not alone in my concerns.

In a  recent survey of IT managers  94%, of 300 IT managers surveyed at this years' InfoSecurity Europe exhibition regarded smartphones as a growing security risk, with concern higher among enterprises with more than 1000 employees (97%) than smaller organisations (91%).

The full details are at:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/06/03/230910/smartphones-becoming-an-increased-security-risk.htm

There are of course lots of things that can be done to mitigate the security risks to mobile devices. For enterprises there is a good guide to device and data security at:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/enterprise/security.mspx

I recently got hold of the latest Windows Mobile 6 ROM Update for the Orange E650 Smartphone. Note this does not upgrade the device to Windows 6.1 just patches issues in the Windows Mobile 6 release. We are still waiting to discover whether an update for Windows Mobile 6.1 will be available for this platform.

Apparently for the ROM update fixes numerous defects with freezing/lock and Bluetooth issues. It upgrades the device to ROM version 1.35.61.1

I have installed the update on my E650 and so far no issues or problems. Battery life also seems marginally better. I know many people who have had frequent lockups etc with this device at times so if you have these issues, this is a recommended upgrade.

Installing the Update

Note that this is a ROM update so will wipe all previous data on the device. I would recommend you do the following:

• Make sure the device is connected to a charging source or has at least 20 minutes of power left before commencing the upgrade.
• Perform a backup of all data and software on the device you wish to keep.
• If you have encrypted data and SD cards on the device ensure you have also got an unencrypted backup of the data and SD card contents. Windows Mobile 6 lets you encrypt data and SD cards as standard but the encryption is tied to the specific device. There is a slim chance that if the upgrade goes wrong you will not be able to recover the keys on the device to decrypt.
• Remember the partnership name used as you will need to re-create it.

Getting the Update

The link for the Windows Mobile 6 ROM for the E650 is as follows:

http://www.business.orange.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Business&c=OUKDevice&cid=1044134892703&extarg1=Phone&t=SMEDeviceDownloads

The page linked to from the above URL also provides another link to a ROM installation guide. This is well worth reading.

Due to some other work commitments,  I almost missed this, but Windows Mobile 6.1 was announced last week.

Some of the headline Windows Mobile 6.1 features are as follows:

• Provides a lot of usability improvements due to new UI screens and plug-ins. There are new transparency effects and plug-ins for Windows Media and Live Search amongst others.
• Performance improvements over 6.0
• Simplified WiFi connection via a single screen rather than the myriad screens currently.
• SMS threading (makes related SMS messages look like an instant messaging conversation). You can now also embed and use hyperlinks in SMS messages.
• New version of Mobile Internet Explorer.
• Other miscellaneous improvements.

From what I've seen it looks to be more evolution rather than revolution but definitely very welcome and well worth a look.

Product Videos

I found find two useful videos on Windows Mobile 6.1 both of which give a run down of some of the features. The first is much longer at 40 minutes but is a presentation by the Windows Mobile team on some of the new features and gives some of their origins. You can find it on the MSN Video site here.

The second is more cut down and polished and is on the official Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 site along with other info about Windows Mobile 6.1.

Enterprise Benefits - Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008

One of the key elements for enterprises,  will be the inclusion of a client for the new Microsoft System Center 2008 Mobile Device Manager server technology. You'd have to look hard to find a longer product name! This allows an enterprise to centrally manage and deploy  windows mobile devices and applications as well as providing a Mobile VPN for secure mobile access to corporate resources. Microsoft System Center 2008 Mobile Device Manager was officially announced on April 1 (yes I know - great date choice!). You can find more details here.

Device Upgrades

Windows Mobile 6.1 is likely to be offered as standard on many new Windows Mobile devices. It has already been shown on devices from a number of US cellular operators. As for existing devices, one of the videos shows Windows Mobile 6.1  being demonstrated running on the US Htc Tilt model,  which  has a broadly equivalent European model in the Htc TynTyn II. As ever,  precise availability will depend on the desire of the relevant mobile operators to release it, but at least we know its possible.

Windows Mobile 6.1 Device Emulators

For developers interested in understanding what's changed in the latest versions and how to develop applications for Windows Mobile 6.1,  you can now get the latest emulators to try things out. I've only just started to download and install these, so haven't really found out whether 6.0 applications will run unaltered yet.

The emulators for Professional and Standard version of 6.1 are available at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3D6F581E-C093-4B15-AB0C-A2CE5BFFDB47&displaylang=en

Unfortunately they are currently only in USA English. I'm assuming localised emulators will follow shortly.

Comparing Versions Of Windows Mobile

Its often difficult to keep up with the differences between Windows Mobile 5.0, 6.0 and 6.1 but I found this useful comparison chart which neatly differentiates them.

Well - it has finally happened. After a number of false starts and numerous of captive creations in various labs, McAfee has reported in the past few weeks, that the first real Windows Mobile virus/trojan to be experienced in the "wild" has been discovered. The virus is known as WinCE/InfoJack.

Its gone relatively unnoticed in Europe as to date, it has mainly affected South East Asia.

What Does it Do?

According to McAfee, WinCE/InfoJack has a number of features that show its malicious intent:

• Installing as an autorun program on the memory card
• Installing itself to the phone when an infected memory card is inserted
• Protecting itself from deletion, copying itself back to disk
• Replaces the browser's home page
• Allows unsigned applications to install without warning

As it disables the Windows Mobile application installation security, the virus allows itself to be to auto updated. It also leaves the mobile open to other malware being installed silently.Furthermore, it has the capacity to send data about the device and its possibly its contents to external locations.

What Does It Mean?

To date Windows Mobile has been relatively unaffected by malware and viruses. However,  I've always maintained that their portability, their myriad of connectivity options (3G, WiFi, Bluetooth) and the sheer numbers of devices out there makes them a significant threat both inside an outside an organisation. Imagine a botnet of mobile devices with HSPDA connectivity! Coupled with the amount of sensitive corporate data often carried on these devices that could be stolen and the threat is clear. The fact that memory cards are involved means the capacity to infect other kinds of devices is also a possibility.

So What Can You Do?

Get anti-virus & malware software for your device. Although relatively unpublicised, many of the leading anti-virus providers such as McAfee, Symantec amongst others have had antivirus components for Windows Mobile for several years. Many of these are add-ons aimed at the corporate environment however. Although not necessarily a recommendation, I personally have used the AirScanner suite of tools without any issues so far. It contains firewall utilities as well as anti-virus tools and can be regularly updated over the air.

The other thing to do is be far more sceptical about the origins of any software you install and whether you can verify its authenticity. For a long time people have installed shareware on mobile devices with relative impunity but with this announcement attitudes will need to be revised somewhat.

I don't wish to be considered a doom-monger and if you take precautions and adopt secure usage patterns you shouldn't be affected. I can't help feeling that the world of mobile devices is entering a new era however.

A shameless plug for a talk I will be giving to the NxtGen User Group Oxford Branch next Tuesday 11th March 2008 at RM offices in Abingdon, Oxfordshire at 7PM.

The talk will build on my previous Introduction to Windows Mobile Development talk and will provide a hands-on introduction to the development, unit testing and deployment of Windows Mobile 6 applications. I will be explaining and demonstrating the coding fundamentals behind successful Windows Mobile applications. Coding samples and solutions will also demonstrate some of the latest features of Visual Studio 2008 and Compact Framework 3.5.

You can find full details the event and how to attend etc at the NxtGen User Group site

If you can make it would be great to you there.

This is a slightly belated "catch-up" post to update those that haven't seen it elsewhere, but Scott Guthrie has posted further details (Parts 3 and 4) of  the ASP.Net MVC Framework on his blog.  ASP.Net MVC Part 3 is available here and ASP.Net MVC Part 4 is available here.

ASP.Net MVC is not a solution for everyone as you lose things like state management and parts of the page lifecycle. It does however offer very targetted functionality for those that have a specific need for Model View Controller based solutions.

The ASP.Net MVC framework is now available for download as part of the new Microsoft ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions Preview . This is a roll-up release of new functionality to be added to ASP.Net 3.5 and ADO.Net  in 2008. It currently includes the following:

• ASP.Net MVC Framework
• ASP.Net Dynamic Data
• ASP.Net AJAX
• ADO.Net Entity Framework
• ADO.Net Data Services
• Silverlight Controls for ASP.Net

Some of these elements were previously available via the ASP.Net Futures CTP.  This is now superceded by the extensions preview.

You can get the ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions Preview from here

This is a shameless plug for a talk being given by Daniel Moth from Microsoft, on Visual Studio 2008 and Framework 3.5. I have previously attended and given talks at he NxtGen User Group events. Daniel is an entertaining speaker and Visual Studio 2008 and Framework 3.5 is well worth hearing about, so if you have the time its well worth going along to.

The talk is being held in Abingdon at 7PM on Monday 14th January 2008. You can get full details on registration and attending here.

Firstly Happy 2008 to one and all!

Those of you that have read this blog previously, will know that I have a lot of compatibility issues with Windows Vista 64 bit. Most of these issues relate to web and mobile device development using Visual Studio 2005.  I have only just managed to get debugging running with ASP.Net development. I've never managed to debug a Windows Mobile device application or deploy content files via Visual Studio 2005 on a 64 bit OS. I keep getting "module not loaded" breakpoint errors even in the simplest of projects. Yet the same code copied to Visual Studio 2005 on Windows XP works just fine without alteration. I'm not sure where the issue regarding debugging mobile projects lies, but my suspicions are that it is a permission,WOW64 emulator or device cradling related. Unless of course I have some twisted configuration somewhere.

Visual Studio 2008 on Vista 64 bit

Recently however I installed Visual Studio 2008 on Windows Vista 64 bit (I'd previously only tried it on Windows XP 32 bit) and life is good.

Installation was a breeze, with the requirement for 64 bit versions recognised correctly. Amazingly, I can now code debug and deploy all my mobile applications without any issues at all, straight out-of-the box, with no configuration changes! It even seems slightly faster!

You do have to convert Visual Studio 2005 projects to the new Visual Studio 2008 format but so far I have done this and so far haven't experienced any major issues. The only issue I experienced was trying to remember the password I had used for the key signing file for the assemblies!

As with the Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005 process, following the conversion to 2008 format you can't then edit the solution again in Visual Studio 2005. In my case, given the behaviour on 64 bit this isn't a major loss, but I worked on a copy just to be sure. A backup copy is made automatically by the conversion process anyway, in case things go wrong.

Upgrading To Compact Framework 3.5

Interestingly Visual Studio 2008 contains an Upgrade Project option (Right click on a mobile project in Solution Explorer) which states that it will irreversibly convert the project to Compact Framework 3.5. I am not entirely sure what this entails but intend to try this in the future.

Carry on Coding...

So right now I am going to do all my personal mobile coding on Visual Studio 2008 and start to explore Compact Framework 3.0 and 3.5 more. At least on my machine it looks like Visual Studio 2008 is the mobile IDE that 64 bit Windows Vista always needed. For some reason Visual Studio 2005 couldn't quite do that for me.

At long last you can now get Office 2007 support for earlier Windows Mobile 6  and some Windows Mobile 5 devices! So you can now view Office 2007 documents on your handheld.

It was released by Microsoft last week (28 November) without much fanfare. I first became aware of it from   a post from Jason Langridge's on his MSDN blog

Some of the very recent Windows Mobile 6 devices already appear to have it. For example my HTC TynTyn II (which is a great device, by the way)  already appears to have office 6.1, so doesn’t need it.

Device Version Support

This is how the device support breaks down:

1) Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC or Windows Mobile 6 devices - as long as it came with Office Mobile you can use the FREE upgrade to install Office 6.1 and get support for Office 2007 documents .

2) Windows Mobile 6 Standard device (i.e. Smartphone) which didn’t come with Office Mobile (e.g. The HTC S620) - for the first time I am aware of you can buy Office Mobile 6.1 from the Handango Retail store and install that assuming your device has free space.

3) Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone (e.g the ubiquitous SPV C500 etc ) - you are out of luck however! Sadly there is no upgrade path or way of getting Office Mobile 6.1  If Office 2007 support is that important to you, you are looking at a device or Windows Mobile OS upgrade if one  is available.

In addition to Office 2007 support there are some other new features around charting in Excel and support for Zip folders.  You can get full details here as well- http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4b106c1f-51e2-42f0-ba32-69bb7e9a3814&DisplayLang=en

Installation Tips

I selected the Worldwide English US (default)  download for my installations.  On my SPV E650 I found that the installation complained about my device having a different language installed compared to the update. I therefore I set the language (not the locale) on the device (Start / Settings / Regional Settings) to be US English rather than UK English. This requires the phone to be powered off and on again. The update then installed fine and I set it back to English afterwards (with another power on/off)! I couldn't see a specific UK English install amongst all the other downloads so this may be the way forward.

Availability on Windows Update

I don’t know whether this is going out on Windows Update for Mobile 6 devices or not. It is a 12.6 Mb update and I'm not sure if it is considered a core OS update.

SmartPhone (Windows Mobile 6 Standard) Issues & Workarounds

I have just installed it on my SPV E650 and it seems fine in Word and supports .docx files. I haven’t put any large documents through it however.  I did notice that the Smartphone version (sorry Windows Mobile 6 Standard) still doesn't let you create documents natively on the device however. Not sure why this is given some of the devices such as the e650 now have fullish keyboard support.

The workaround to this frustration is fairly well known. You simply copy a blank document or template document to your device using Active Sync or Windows Mobile Device Center. Then open the blank document each time and use the Save As menu option to save it to the filename of your choice... Easy. Why there is a Save AS but not New, I'm not sure.

Future Tasks

I am going to try this Office 6.1  update on a Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC device (Orange M5000) shortly so I'll update this post when I know what happens there...

Scott Guthrie has made Part 2 of his blog on this important addition to ASP.Net available on his blog. This carries on from his initial look at teh ASP.net MVC (Model View Controller) in part 1 and explores deeper into the internals of the routing architecture.

So I don't repeat any of it, you can find out all about it at: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/03/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-2-url-routing.aspx

Whilst working on my current piece of Windows Mobile application development I discovered a little tweak in the Windows Mobile emulator that significant helped my development time.

Making Mobile Applications Orientation Aware

Like all good mobile developers, I am trying to make my mobile application "orientation aware". This means that the application will work on the maximum number of devices in landscape and portrait orientations at a variety of resolutions. If you want to find out more about this check out some of the links below.In particular take a look at the Orientation Aware control that ships with the Microsoft Windows Mobile Client Software Factory which provides this functionality out of the box. You can subclass it to your specific requirements.

• Developing Orientation and dpi Aware Applications for the .NET Compact Framework  - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms838174.aspx 
• MSDN Webcast: patterns & practices for Mobile Client: Designing Zero-Code Adaptive UIs Using the Orientation Aware Control (Level 200) - http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032310458&CountryCode=US 
• Mobile Client Software Factory – July 2006 - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480471.aspx

Emulators Can Help

Microsoft supplies a number of great mobile emulators that each try to best represent the characteristics of all of these devices, languages and orientations for development purposes without having to physically deploy to each device. However starting and stopping the relevant emulator each time just to switch orientation was getting a bit time consuming particularly when switching from portrait to landscape.

A Nifty Time Saver...

I recently discovered that if you click the calendar "hardware" button on the "chrome" surround of an emulator image, it toggles the emulator from portrait to landscape or vice versa. Simple but effective and a great time saver. It seems to work with both Windows Mobile 6 Classic and Professional Emulators but I haven't tried it with a Windows Mobile 6 Standard emulator. As I said it's the little things that matter.

Those who saw my post of 16th October wll know that Microsoft announced an MVC (Model View Controller) Framework for ASP.Net recently. More announcement details are here.

Scott Guthrie has now started to provide a lot more detail on this and you can see Part one of this here in one of his recent blog posts. In this first detailed post Scott takes a step-by-step look into the taxonomy of an application based around the MVC framework and ASP.Net 2.0.

Its a big post and I'm only part way through all the detail,  but it looks like it could have some really useful benefits for certain kinds of applications. It is well worth the read.

As yet no date on the actual code release but hopefully this is coming soon.

Just a small update to say I've noticed that Microsoft have put out a new web site to try and promote Windows Mobile.

It is very different to the standard site and has some cool video and graphics usage. Just let the opening screen run and you'll see what I mean.  Unfortunately a lot of the content is US orientated (e.g US only mobile operators) but it looks nice.

You can see it here

Last week at the Alt.Net conference, Micosoft pre-announced built-in support for the Model View Controller pattern in ASP.Net. One of the advantages of an MVC pattern is the cleaner separation between the data, process and presentation mechanisms within a given application, allowing for easier adjustments to changes in process.

The MVC support will be released as part of a new ASP.Net MVC framework and more details will be announced in the next few weeks. Because of the nature of an MVC application, the ASP.Net MVC framework will not use the existing post-back model for server interaction. As a result, no viewstate or other similar elements associated with the page lifecycle will be supported. Instead it looks likely that all server interactions will post back to a specific controller class instead. I'm guessing that this uses a variation on the cross-page postback model introduced in ASP.Net 2.0 but without the page state.

There are currently no specifc release dates but it looks likely to release sometime in the first half of 2008.

You can get more details on this from Scott Guthries blog post on this