Hopper is designed to monitor the overall health of the device and will only concern itself with exceptions that affect overall system stability. Knowing what exceptions are critical to stability and which are annoying comes from lots of experience and...

Data Abort: Thread=9352cc9c Proc=90876ea0 'shell32.exe' AKY=00000005 PC= 03f74680( coredll.dll+0x00014680) RA=03257104(aygshell.dll+0x00037104) BVA=060000e0 FSR=00000007 AKY à "Access Key" Process slot bitmask corresponding to the processes...

As many Hopper experts already know, running Hopper in Flight Mode (radio turned OFF) is an excellent way of isolating problems from the radio stack. In fact, my number one suggestion when I encounter a new problem is to try and repro in Flight Mode to...

Greetings all, please be patient while this blog is populated. I promise lots of good stuff is coming down the tube.

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...

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....

In my previous post , we saw how to setup two CE devices and run a Bluetooth performance test. In this one, we'll see how to process and analyze the log file generated on the DUT device. I will use Excel to perform some calculations on the data and to...

Recently I was challenged with a flash corruption problem and was forced to figure out how to boot a RAM image (ie: image NOT stored to flash) on my p2Sample device. I thought I would be clever and start with a tiny_kernel image and simply add the filesystem...

Do you think you've got what it takes to educate developers, device makers, business & marketing decision makers and IT Professionals on delivering compelling devices, experiences, and cool applications? Well, Microsoft’s Mobile and Embedded Developer...

If you run DevHealth on your devices you probably saw dup(d) on the page summary for a process or a dll. It looks something like this: === lap_pw.dll page summary: code=0[rom(C):0 ram(c):0] data r/o(R)=0 r/w=0[ro(r)=0 rw(W)=0 exe(E)=0 dll(D)=0 heap...

Recently the JDP team investigated a group of KITL timeout failures. Each timeout occurred under similar conditions and seemed to be associated with a single bug. At first we were puzzled as to why we were seeing these failures on different devices with...

There has been some confusion around the OS version supporting Windows Mobile 6. Sue Loh does an excellent job explaining the differences and even some of the “why” in the CE Base team blog . There is additional helpful information in the Comments section...

Posted by Javier Flores Assad (aka "The MTTF Dude") A new and enhanced version of "exception filtering" shipped with the Windows Mobile 6 kernel debugger. For full details follow this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/ce_base/archive/2007/04/25/windows...

In the first part we talked briefly about KITL timeouts. In this article we are going to give you a little bit more details and try to explain why it behaves the way it does. How did we run into this issue? It all started with Hopper (apparently...

I have recently discovered that the CEPC platform is no longer shipped with Windows Mobile. Unfortunately, the Windows Mobile documentation contains many references to this platform (which you won’t have) and we are working hard on tightening up our documentation...

This is the first of the FitNFinish articles that we’re planning to write. (If you’re wondering what FitNFinish is, read this .) As with all FitNFinish articles, the intended audience is Windows Mobile OEMs who write drivers and platform code. End users...

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...

For anyone who hasn’t seen this content, MSDN is now hosting “eHow-tos” which are “multimedia documentation” modules covering a wide range of topics. Scrolling through the list you can find modules about application development, bringing up a new platform...

Hi, my name is Fernando Gonzalez. I have been working in the Windows CE team since January, 2002. I started in the CE Tools team (Platform Builder Debugger, remote tools), then moved to networking (Bluetooth, IR, Wifi) and finally in the JDP team. ...

Understanding the nuances between test kits and what tests are appropriate for your device is very important. Since you are reading HoppeRx, I can assume Windows Mobile development, but the information given is valid for general WinCE development as well...

OOM stands for Out Of Memory and is considered “business as usual” for Windows Mobile devices. Depending on the application and your platform, clicking on a close button will most likely not terminate your current application, just minimize it. Most apps...

Anyone witnessing Hopper in action can attest to the annoying chips, clicks and rings coming from the device under test – running many devices adds to the cacophony and your office is soon inhabitable. Hopper always seems to find the loudest speaker setting...

A large part of diagnosing Hopper issues is trying new things. I always encourage calculated change to see how change may affect your Hopper outcomes. Often however, what you think might be an updated executable is actually just a rebuilt version of the...

Contributed by Javier Flores Assad (AKA "MTTF Dude") The normal (by default) KD trap mechanism is the part of the kernel that triggers a break into the debugger when an exception is thrown. Sometimes you are not interested in some exceptions and...

l Debugging exceptions is the same process regardless of type, but often it is helpful to understand the difference between the most common types of exceptions: Raise Exception: This is most often sourced from a handled exception where the programmer...