So I had the opportunity to try out the iPhone for a day. Overall I was impressed, but there were some very basic features missing from many of the otherwise killer apps that I would greatly miss if I was to use the iPhone as my primary PDA and phone. Here is a brief summary:Then of course there's the closed platform problem, and I miss...
The XmlSerializer in NetCF 2.0 has a bug where if a single serialization requires reflecting into types that use a mixture of Collection<T>-like types for the same T the XmlSerializer will throw an exception. Here an example where CF 2.0 would crash: This type would fail to serialize under NetCF 2.0 because T = string would appear...
With the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 release which comes with Visual Studio 2008, a new Windows Communication Foundation transport is introduced that uses email as the communication mechanism. Others have already blogged about this new transport including Roman Batoukov and David Kline. I'd like to take a poll of the audience to see how you li...
The iPhone was a hit, and people look to Microsoft to produce a ZunePhone in some future version of their Zune music player. But I ask you, "Why?!" What you may not be aware of is that Windows Smartphones already do everything that we hope ZunePhone will do. Just check out this feature list: ...
The .NET Compact Framework 3.5 adds a subset of the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF or "Indigo") to smart devices, allowing them to communicate with desktop WCF components with all the flexibility of multiple, interchangeable service bindings and endpoints. Although it ships out of the box only with support for message-level communicati...
The .NET Compact Framework team just released the Consumer Technology Preview (CTP) of the Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5. These Power Toys are tools to help you build, debug and optimizie your NetCF 3.5 applications. My personal favorite is the NetCF ServiceModel Metadata Tool (NetCFSvcUtil.exe) which allows NetCF clients...
InfoCard is the greatest invention since the web browser! In my opinion anyway. If you don't agree or you haven't heard of InfoCard, please read from the www.identityblog.com, and in particular the post on the Laws of Identity. It's really quite impressive what engineering problems InfoCard has been able to solve. I'm just gett...
One would expect that the WPF ListBox control would have some kind of FocusedIndex property to find out which item has the keyboard focus (and that dashed border around it) -- but it's not there. It seems the workaround requires a few lines of code, which I present here. ListBox.SelectionMode = Single In a ListBox's default mode that all...
The .NET Compact Framework has had several releases: V1 + 3 service packs, V2 + 2 service packs, V3.5 (to date just betas). Which of these are installed on your device? Can you have multiple versions installed simultaneously? Which version will run your NetCF app if multiple versions are installed? This post addresses all th...
[Updated: 21Nov07 to clarify that custom headers are supported, but not in NetCFSvcUtil proxy generation] [Updated: 27Aug07 to correct Gzip sample, and clarify on transports & extensibility] [Updated: 23Aug07 to add SecurityAlgorithmSuite enumerable]Many people have been asking about what subset of .NET 3.0's Windows Communication Foundati...
