My apologies to the readers of this blog - the HoppeRx contributors have all be busy working on the next version of Windows Phone and posts have been few-and-far-between. Let me assure you that the next version is very cool and worth the wait. Thanks...

WM6.5 introduced some new layering/compositing technologies that have the potential to break some display driver assumptions. If your display driver is vulnerable to this problem, it will likely break in LTK test #4040 during camera preview orientation...

Establishing the correct value for Hopper runtimes can sometimes be challenging due to the number of places this value is stored. Some are reporting that the Hopper log runtime numbers at the top of the file don’t always match the values reported at the...

Windows Mobile displays are get larger and UI assets become more robust which is putting additional VM pressure on GWES to marshal all this additional data. Depending on the situation, implementing a “shared heap” using CeHeapCreate() to store assets...

The ability to try out bug fixes is a valuable part of the Hopper process and re-building images quickly is one of the easiest ways to improve your Hopper numbers. We recently went about trying to find the combination of build server parts that makes...

Below is the second half of a well executed document from guestRx: Bulent Elmaci. Bulent has worked with Windows Mobile debugging for a long time and backs up his writing with a lot of experience. It is the first of a series of articles he has written...

Below is a well executed document from guestRx: Bulent Elmaci. Bulent has worked with Windows Mobile debugging for a long time and backs up his writing with a lot of experience. It is the first of a series of articles he has written to help our OEM's...

I am not much of a programming book person, I am much more likely to select code and press "F1". However, I find myself reaching for a CE 6.0 book and have been finding it quite useful. "Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Fundamentals" [Pavlov, Belevsky][ISBN 0735626251...

Virtual Memory changes included in Windows Mobile 6.1 can relocate read- only code sections out of Slot 0 and into a higher address range. This change was taken to relieve pressure from our coveted, read- write Slot 0. This change will be transparent...

Interesting post over at "Reed & Steve" regarding Hopper and full screen apps and the Start Menu Dead message. Check it out here . Kudos to them for making this available.

A recurring theme I see while debugging application compatibility issues has to do with the direct use of the window proc pointer. If the intended WNDPROC exists in a DLL that is located in Slot 0, the pointer “looks right” and is often mistakenly used...

Do you want to work on next generation Windows Mobile devices long before they become commercially available? Want to be the first one to work with and influence next year’s Windows Mobile devices? Then you’re in luck! The Windows Mobile team is looking...

Many OEM’s have already noticed that Memory Doctor doesn’t correctly represent VM overlap in some pre-release versions of Windows Mobile. There have been some changes in WM VM architecture that contradict an assumption made by MemoRx which results in...

I was debugging a weird hang at device boot and I used the command “meminfo kernel” in CeDebugX to get more info, but I realized right away that I didn’t know what this command was showing me. So, I did a bit of investigation into what the output meant...

I'm sure many of you have been in a situation where your device hangs during field testing. Or sometimes you are trying to track down a problem which only repros at a certain location. The best thing you can have in these situations is, of course, a live...

There are a lot of people that afraid to switch of Vista because they are afraid that their stuff will not work. Well truth be told, I've been running Vista+VS2005_SP1+PB6 since March of this year and haven't had any major problems. The only two problems...

I was recently running hopper on a device that supported screen rotation and I realized that my test coverage was completely missing the rotation scenario. The device would switch between portrait and landscape mode if the user took a specific action...

If you upgraded from an older version of Hopper to a more recent one, you probably noticed that the callstacks are gone from the Hopper logs. We made them optional for two reasons: 1. Printing out callstacks slowed down the run significantly ...

Why my private binaries do not show up in the image? I've been asked this question too many times by now. Many partners when testing their private changes have to figure it out the hard way. The reason why your updated binary doesn't show up in the...

There have been a few blogs that talk about the benefit of focusing hopper runs on individual applications to work out the stability bugs one application at a time. But, there comes a time when testing one by one may not be the best use of resources....

I don't know how many times I wished Platform Builder had an option to load PDB files with timestamps that do not match my executable. This option was available for desktop users for decades. Windbg and other desktop debuggers can do it without problems...

I was recently talking with a colleague about the RIL Proxy and it occurred to me that this component isn't well known and is pretty confusing. I've been digging into the RIL Proxy for a little while now so I've become pretty comfortable with it, so I...

The release of Windows Mobile 6 (WM6) gave us a few more tools for dealing with Virtual Memory (VM) issues. Compaction of slot 1 is new for WM6, in previous releases all slot 1 modules were aligned on 64k boundaries, causing VM address space to be wasted...

This FitNFinish document describes a number of best practices for creating Windows Mobile devices with QWERTY keyboards. Although there are a lot of suggestions for placement of keys, my main purpose for writing this was to describe the best way to handle...

The blog "Snow White's Poison Apple" describes how to test the most common suspend/resume hang. Other suspend/resume issues can be debugged over a "Passive KITL" connection. A standard KITL connection (a.k.a. "Active KITL") gets dropped when a device...