Happy New Year and if you took some time out then hope it was a good one!!

Well the SMS Voter app that I put together a year back still generates a lot of interest so I found some time over the holiday break to write V2 of the SMS Voting application. Lol, remind me not to do that again!!

It's much improved over version 1 and many thanks to Shane's feedback it's much friendly as well - ta Shane!!

So what's new?

1. 10 active polls with their own score criteria
2. Three vote types: First Vote Wins, Last Vote Wins, Allow Multiple Votes
3. Prize Draws: selects a random vote by poll or score
4. Much better User Interface giving a much more interactive/friendly experience.
5. Multi threaded to allow messages to be processed in the background while querying results and updating poll properties in the foreground
6. Much improved database performance!!
   • With the SMS Voter database loaded with 30000 votes then performance for new votes ranges from 45 to 100 inserts (or updates) per second on a i-mate Smartflip and 60 and 150 per second on a i-mate Jasjam.  This is way in excess of the number of SMS votes that a phone would receive from a network. (Btw, the reason for the variance is due to vote types processed, some requiring selects (to check for previous votes) before inserts or updates)
   • Table structure very simple - 1 Table with 2 composite indexes.
   • Query (select group by) performance is fine for polls up to around 8000 votes then it starts to get a little sluggish - but again this is way in excess of this applications typical usage scenario.  Query performanance for polls with up to around 4000 votes is blindly quick:)

Installation Locations

The Smartphone version is available from http://www.smartphone.net/software_detail.asp?id=2983.

Pocket PC Phone Edition version

• I want to do more testing of the Pocket PC version as I spotted a UI glitch today and I'm not sure if it's was a platform problem or an issue with the PPC version of the app.  Bar that I'll publish it to www.pocketgear.com by the end of the week.
• If you'd like to test out the Pocket PC Phone version then please drop me a note via my blog and I'll send you a link...

User Guide

The User Guide is available from http://blogs.msdn.com/dglover/pages/sms-voter-2-0-online-documention.aspx...

Cheers, Dave

Hmmm, me thinks time to replace my UPS, Bushfire causes massive blackouts, blimey!!