dale lane

Finally – a chance to play with my new Windows Mobile developer kit. I had my first go with it tonight, and so far, I’m pretty impressed.

The Windows Mobile 5 API exposes a lot of nice stuff to the developer – just looking through the overview page on MSDN.com showed me lots of stuff I want to have a go with. Like interacting with the phone, incoming calls, SMS messages – sent or received, using the phone’s internal camera, getting all sorts of system info like battery data, and loads more. So much to play with! The overview page also shows how easy it is to access the Pocket Outlook database, so I thought that this would be a good place to start.

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Microsoft give away free developer resource kits for Windows Mobile. A two-disc DVD set, it comes with everything needed to write apps for Windows Mobile 5 – an IDE, SDK, the .NET Compact Framework, emulators for development and testing, API and documentation, and a bunch of educational resources like samples, walkthroughs and videos. I ordered it a little while ago, and it’s finally come.

I’m out tonight, so will have to wait before I can have a play. I’m looking forward to it, though – will have to try writing a small app for my phone tomorrow night.

I tried writing another Outlook extension tonight. This time, a desktop widget to display a dashboard-style at-a-glance view of how busy I am (based on my Microsoft Outlook task list).

I wrote it to run in the background, and update itself once a minute. This raised an interesting question – what to do with the handle to Outlook.

Getting the handle to Outlook is probably the slowest bit of the app, so I don’t want to do this every minute. But caching a handle and reusing it ad-infinitum probably isn’t safe – what if Outlook is closed or restarted, (or… whatever happens when Windows hibernates?) while the widget app is running? Would the widget hold locks on the Outlook data file and cause a closing Outlook to hang? Or would the widget just fall over the next time it tried to use an invalid handle to the Outlook object model?

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I wrote a bunch of command-line apps a while ago that let me control my Outlook task list. As a big GTD devotee, everything that I do revolves around my task list. And as someone who spends a lot of time at the command prompt, these apps mean being able to add something to my task list when I think of it – without interrupting what I am doing. It means not needing to Alt-Tab to Microsoft Outlook, waiting for it to wake up, opening a new Form… all of which takes me away from what I was doing when I thought of whatever task needed capturing on my list.

But recently, Outlook started throwing up security warnings when I use them… which means I have to Alt-Tab to Outlook anyway to tick the box telling it it’s not under attack. 🙁

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windbg is a debugger for Windows. It can step through programs while they run, or be used to examine the dumps produced when Windows crashes or hangs (including when you get the infamous blue-screen-of-death).

And with a couple of simple commands, it can get you a long way towards figuring out the cause of the problem.

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I’ve been having a bit of a play with Java 5 to see what is new, and I’m impressed. There’s lots of neat little things to give developers less to worry about. One of these is the introduction of in-built support for thread pooling.

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