MelSam's Blog

TechMela was simply fabulous. Best part of it was, technology experts across domains came under one roof and interacted one to one.

In the Enterprise mobility space, we really enjoyed all the sessions conducted by you, Loke and Derek. In a very short time, a lot of distance was covered. I was personally impressed seeing your command over managed as well as native programming. Your ScreenLib implementation is great. It makes things so simple while doing the native development.

Looking forward to more such opportunities of learning from experts like  you.

Hi

We are currently in process of port our application from PPC 6700 to Palm Treo 700WX. We have seen that our application abruptly exists.

Scenarios:

1)When navigating between different screens of the application

2) When navigating from the application to the TODAY of the of Windows Moible.

3) We have also seen the application is initalizing it just disappears.

4) We have also observered that there are 2 to 3 instances of the application memory.

5) We have also observed that application doesn't start when we click on the Application Icon.

Hi

We are currently in process of port our application from PPC 6700 to Palm Treo 700WX. We have seen that our application abruptly exists.

Scenarios:

1) When navigating between different screens of the application

2) When navigating from the application to the TODAY of the Windows Moible.

3) We have also seen the application is initializing it just disappears.

4) We have also observed that there are 2 to 3 instances of the application memory.

5) We have also observed that application doesn't start when we click on the App Icon.

Dependent Software

1).NET CF 2.0 SP2

2)SQL CE 3.1

About the Application

1) Multi Threaded

2) Network connection based

Question.

1) Could you give some hints the behavior of the application that we observing? (Scenarios Described)

2) Do you of any issue of port the code or the guide line that need to be followed?

Thank you

Regards

Ram(r.rampraveen@otis.com)

Mel, I was there in the mobile platform all 3 days and you are exceptional....thank you for your efforts and coming all the way to India. I really love Microsoft Windows Mobile...I switched from Palm, couple of years back...and enjoyed your great innovation... Once again thank you so much to you and your team at Microsoft. All the very best Mel.

Ram, I'll try to give some inputs on the issues you are facing.

1. Windows Mobile devices are very personal in nature. Meant to provide instant access to different things. Hence, unless an application has explicitly provisioned for its closure / exit, the application continues to run endlessly. To understand this, try the following. In your WM device Settings->System->Memory->Running programs, individually close all applications that you feel need not run continuously. E.g. File Explorer, Contacts, etc. Next, start one of the programs that you closed. Say the File Explorer. Close this application using the 'X' icon in the top right. You will return to Today screen probably. Here is the trick: File Explorer has only gone to background (minimized) and has not closed. You can check this by checking in Settings->System->Memory->Running programs.

Reason I have understood for such a behavior is to enable quick application rendering the next time the user tries to hit the application icon again. Since the app is already running, it is matter of just bringing it to foreground.

2. .NET CF ensures that for the applications that have a GUI, only one instance is running, however number of times the user tries to launch the program. For non-gui based apps, the developer has to take little care and do some coding.

Coming to your issue of seeing multiple instances in memory: You must be having multiple forms in your application. Depending on how the application is used, you must be initializing the forms and showing them to the user. For each of the form that is initialized in the application, the 'Running Programs' section will report them as an application instance. Hence say when you start the app, there is just one form (the opening one) which is initialized and active. At this point if you check the Running programs you'll notice just one instance. When the user uses your app that triggers another forms initialization, it will get added into the Running programs list. Idea is, the developer has to manage what is to be shown to the user. If the there are multiple forms open. All of them can be individually seen by the user by activating them through the Running Programs section. Actually, there is only one app instance. What the Running programs is reporting is the GUI forms that are open. Mind you, it will not list any non gui app that must be running in the background.

Tip: How do you ensure that the user sees a particular form only, irrespective of how many forms you have open in the app? We used by showing the desired form as a Dialog and not as a simple form. e.g. Say we have a Form 'frm1'. It has been initialized (i.e. new object instantiated). To bring it to user's focus simple way would have been to call the Show() method. Instead, use, frm.ShowDialog() method. Giving a sample code snippet that worked for us.

SomeForm frm1 = new SomeForm();

DialogResult dr = DialogResult.None;

do

{

    dr = frm1.ShowDialog();

} while (dr == DialogResult.Retry);

frm1.Dispose();

In the above we ensure that frm1 maintains focus even if user accidentally tries to activate the parent form say from the Running Programs section.

3. For your issue of app not starting when the icon is hit, reason could be the app must be already running and waiting for some event or must have stuck up some where. Single stepping could help you gauge the issue.

4. Application disappearing: Again single stepping would be the way we would recommend to nail down the issues

Little care should enable you write consistent and stable apps.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

-Manish Jalan

(manish.jalan@patni.com)

It was a fantastic confluence of technology and developers at TechMela,India. The event contents and organization were beyond our expectations.

I attended sessions from embedded and mobile platforms. Especially enjoyed yours, Vignesh, Damon and Brian's sessions.

Mel,I enjoyed the Screenlib session the most due to its simlicity and great presentation.I also could try the demo and found them simply simple to use! Thanks for uploading the demo on internet.

Thanks Microsoft for putting all under one roof!It helped broaden my vision in embedded & mobile development.

Manish, Thanks for that info on 'Running programs' on mobile devices.

Is there a way to stop my non gui code running on the device?

Amruta Samel

Hi Amruta,

AFAIK, I am afraid. You cannot stop a non GUI process that is running on the device. You can at most verify if it is running by attaching the device to Visual Studio. If the app is running, you will see it in the list of running processes.

This is to the best of my knowledge wrt Visual Studio 2005 and Windows Mobile 5 combination. Not sure, if there are any capabilities added in the newer versions.

Regards,

-Manish(manish.jalan@patni.com)

Thanks for the info Manish. I just hope I could halt the application when it starts behaving weird in mid development phase and hangs the entire system and I have to restart the device. Anyways no probs,not a show stopper issue.I rather keep my application clean!

Regards,

Amruta Samel

Patni

A couple of quick pointers for samples and tips on using AJAX and IE Mobile: The Channel9 Wiki has a

A couple of quick pointers for samples and tips on using AJAX and IE Mobile: The Channel9 Wiki has a

I have taken a look at your slides about ASP.NET AJAX and Internet Explorer Mobile 6:

If I follow your recommendation and use a .browser file to set the w3cdomversion to 1.0 the server returns only one of three .axd files which are necessary to use an UpdatePanel. Therefore I cannot use ASP.NET AJAX with IEMobile 6.

If I use the Microsoft AJAX Library with IEMobile 6 also nothing happens. And I was very surprised to read in your slides that one can use ASP.NET AJAX - which uses this Library - with Internet Explorer Mobile 6.

Hi Mel,

Is it possible for you to upload the demo for Building AJAX Applications on IE Mobile.

I too have reviewed the slides, implemented the fixes for ASP.NET AJAX support and have not had any success in getting it to work.  I am running IE Mobile 6.12.

Can you post a quick list of the steps that need to be taken in order to properly configure and view ASP.NET AJAX pages in IE Mobile 6?

It appears that the .zip file of the presentations is no longer available at the link in this posting. I'm interesting in learning more about AJAX apps in Windows Mobile. Any chance you could update the link? (Or provide a pointer to better material?)

Thanks!

John

Could anyone upload the presentation.Looks like its no longer available in the link provided

Thanks!

Ajax doesn't work on mobile 6 - you should have just said that and took a seat!