PlugLondon

December 9th, 2007

Yesterday was PlugLondon – a developer meetup held at Skype’s offices in London.

It was different to the geek meetings I’ve been to before… for one thing, I didn’t bring a laptop or write a line of code!

The focus was slightly different – the idea seemed to be to bring together developers with companies who produce API’s. People came from a variety of tech companies (such as PayPal, eBay, skype, BBC, Yahoo!) to give presentations on the API’s that they are responsible for, either to introduce it or explain some interesting or novel technical aspect. I’ve played with many web services and APIs, but I definitely learnt a few things.

It was a chance for them to get feedback on their API’s from the developers that they’re trying to encourage to use them. It was very interactive – they seemed keen to find out who had tried the API’s, what people thought of them, what people would like to see added or changed, and so on.

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PowerShell for WebSphere MQ

December 4th, 2007

This has been far too long coming, but finally you can administer WebSphere MQ systems from Windows PowerShell. An extension for WebSphere MQ containing thirty-eight new PowerShell cmdlets is being released as “MO74: WebSphere MQ – Windows PowerShell library“.

I’ll write a more technical blog post that describes what sort of stuff you can do with the SupportPac. That might have to wait till next week – as is unfortunately often the way the WPS day-job is taking up a lot of my time! But in the meantime, I just wanted to write a quick post to say “I finally finished version 1, and got it out the door”! 🙂

Update: Want to see what it can do, but don’t have time to try it out? Download the zip file and take a look at the doc “A cookbook for ‘PowerShell for WebSphere MQ'” (powershellcookbook.pdf) that is in there. I’ve put a bunch of examples of commands there with sample output.

Update 2: I’ve made a start on describing how the PowerShell stuff can be used on the WebSphere MQ blog

Upgrading T-Mobile Ameo to Windows Mobile 6

December 4th, 2007

Wow. I really didn’t see this coming: T-Mobile offering upgrades for Windows Mobile phones.

After months and months of “no”, “we can’t do that”, “we won’t be doing that”, and “no, that’s not a good idea”, they started making Windows Mobile 6 upgrades available! Either they sneaked this out quietly, or I just completely missed the lead-up to it (to be honest, entirely possible). First I heard was when Jason Langridge blogged about it yesterday.

I upgraded my HTC Advantage last night, and have been playing with Windows Mobile 6 for a day now.

It’s very sweet.

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Displaying constant names (rather than values) in PowerShell cmdlets

November 21st, 2007

I’ve mentioned before that I’m working on some PowerShell cmdlets for WebSphere MQ. I thought I’d pass on a few tips that I picked up this week on improving the usability of the information displayed by Get- cmdlets in PowerShell.

The easiest way to explain it is to demonstrate with an example:

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New file and directory open and save dialogs for Windows Mobile

November 20th, 2007

Windows Mobile – like standard Windows – has a default “file open” and a “file save” dialog that all applications can use. If you’re writing an app, you can use it in your code with just a few lines. Great!

Except… no. Because they’re rubbish.

This has come up as an issue raised with a couple of apps that I’ve written that use the standard dialogs. I would defend my apps by saying that I didn’t write the dialogs, and that they’re the same that you get in other Windows Mobile apps like Microsoft Word Mobile. But I can’t, really. For a user, this is just an excuse. Wherever the dialog came from, it is rubbish.

I’ve written a couple of new ones for use in my applications. They’re fairly small, so I’ve made them available if anyone else wants to use them with their apps.

In this post, I’ll quickly outline what is wrong with the standard dialogs, and introduce my new ones.

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Registering file extensions with Windows Mobile apps

November 20th, 2007

I took a break from playing with the Android SDK for the first time tonight by making a quick update to my Windows Mobile notepad app.

Previously, to open files I’ve had to launch the notepad, then use File -> Open and choose my file. I wanted to register the .txt file extension with the notepad app, so that I can open files in the notepad by clicking on them. It’s a fairly straightforward thing to do, but I thought it might be helpful to share.

I couldn’t find much information about it, but it’s fairly simple to work out if you use Visual Studio’s Remote Registry Editor to see how other apps do it.

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Asus EEE PC – some first thoughts

November 18th, 2007

Asus EEE PC at StarbucksMy impulse control issues regarding anything small and gadget-y continue. I’m now the proud owner of an Asus EEE PC – the new Linux sub-notebook with a solid state hard-drive.

It seems to be getting a lot of press at the moment (I’ve been seeing reviews pop up all over the place – like PC Pro and TrustedReviews while I’ve been waiting for my pre-order to wing it’s way to me) so I’m reluctant to write yet another review. But I just couldn’t resist the excuse to make a few comments and take a few photos of it!

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I’ve won the “British National Lottery” (or wow… UK spam!)

November 17th, 2007

Spam email is normally fairly annoying, but every now and then you get one that is so bad that it’s actually kind of entertaining.

FROM: BRITISH LOTTERY INTERNATIONAL
([email protected])
SUBJECT: CONGRATULATION YOU ARE A CERTIFIED WINNER WITH OF OUR END OF YEARPROGRAMME

The British National Lottery

Your email has won you lump sum of (£1,000,000.00 pounds Sterling)

You are require to contact the delivery manager for verification and authentication of your claims as the sole beneficiary with your personalinformation.

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