As part of my plan to write a location-based reminder app using Bluetooth devices, I need a way to assign tasks to people, and people to specific Bluetooth device IDs.
I’ve decided to do this using custom properties in Outlook Mobile – the default PIM that comes on all Windows Mobile smartphones and PDAs.
I’ve not used this API before, but after a little playing, I’m impressed with how straightforward it all is.
The idea is that items in the Outlook Mobile PIM have pre-defined properties – so Contacts have fields such as ‘First Name’, or ‘Postcode’. But you can programmatically add new fields, and then store whatever you want in them.
For my purposes, I can add a “Bluetooth Device IDs” property to Contact items in my address book. I can also add pointers to Contact items to Task items in my to do list.
As this is just meant as a quick hack / proof-of-concept, I’m doing this in C#. The code looks something like this: