MacBook, Windows 7 & MonoTouch

Last Friday I got myself a MacBook (it is my first one) and I gotta say that I am pretty impressed with the performance. I made the investment after seeing that it's not good to "invest" everything in just one mobile platform (in a dynamic market it's important to adapt). The first two things that I've done was to install MonoTouch trial (for iPhone development) and Windows 7 (for WP7 and Silverlight development). In W7 with all the drivers installed I have a 5.2 rating which is far better than my 2 year old laptop that I've paid 1.200 Euro (the...

Read More

Good strategy Microsoft

The more I think about it the more I am convinced that Microsoft intentionally let the "trace" in the registry so someone could easily restore the functionality (they are creating the links and then delete them but they could have just released the registry without any link inside). Imagine if Microsoft would have released the emulator with everything enabled the first instinct would have been to say that around 60% of the functionality is not implemented so bad publicity. Instead they lightly "obfuscate" the ROM and leave the key in a file that...

Read More

WP7 Design - Application List

The second design aspect I want to talk about is the Application list. It is a functionality that was never "revolutionized" and in the CTP of WP 7 it is worst than the honeycomb interface in WM 6.5 (I am referring to functionality not design).On the WM 6.5 there are 12 icons on a page and on WP 7 there are only 10 meaning almost 20% less icons. My Omnia II has 5 "pages"of icons without installing any program which would translate in 7 "pages" on...

Read More

WP7 Design - Call & End Call buttons

This post and the next one will have nothing to do with development but will be about design choices that Microsoft made for WP 7 and I don't like. The first one is the decision to eliminate Call and End call hardware buttons in favor of Back and Search buttons. It is a strange choice to me (maybe someone could explain to me why) because the buyer is mainly buying a phone so it will mainly use it for calling. Sure the iPhone has only one button...

Read More

BlockDevice

Looks like I was terrible wrong about the drivers part. BlockDevice is a totally different thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_device#Block_devices So if you are playing around for making the SharedFolder work forget about my idea. Thanks Arktro...

Read More

Net CF 3.5 .exe on WP 7

I asked myself: would it be possible to run an executable compiled with NETCF 3.5 run on WP 7?The answer is very simple: NO for device applications MAYBE for console applications. The reason? There is no System.Windows.Forms library in .NETCF 3.7. Maybe a native application could run but you have to consider that's a new shell in WP 7 so some things changed. For netcf apps even if you could install the old NETCF it will still not work because the shell is different.The only solution would be to install the old shell, but doesn't make any sense...

Read More

WP7 Emulator "Unlocked" - How to

As I promised I will explain shortly how I did it. It was simple. I began with the dump XDA member l2tp did. I mainly looked at the registry file default.hv (as you can see in my other posts) and found the section were they are blocking the applications.So I eliminated the entries in the blacklist, but I also searched the guid presented in the list in the other registry files (.rgu) and also took it out from them.Then there was the section HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Settings...

Read More

WP7 Emulator "Unlocked"

I still cannot believe it but I did it... After a good idea, 6 hours of work and a lot a lot of digging I've unlocked the ROM image in the emulator CTP. I will describe tomorrow the method but right now I will just post some screenshots, upload the bin somewhere so I can give you the link and go to sleep cause it's almost 2 o'clock in the morning.I will also test it better tomorrow put I saw that it has a file explorer :) and a VERY nice task manager:I...

Read More

WP7 Black Listed Applications

Also in the registry there is an entry for a package manager (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PackageManager) with a Blacklist key inside. Blacklist contains a lot of id's. I think this is the way Microsoft intends to block the applications. I am starting to understand the reason why they want the device so closed. Imagine if you would have access at the file system you would be able to modify the registry and remove the entries in the blacklist. Anyway combining this mechanism with the update service gives Microsoft the power...

Read More

WP7 Under the hood - Part 1

As you probably know from my previous post the guys at XDA already made a dump of the emulator binary file. Looking a little in the registry file default.hv (my main reason is to find a way to enable all the hubs as all the files are already in the image file). Some interesting facts from the registry:1. The new shell program it's called telshell.exe (the old one was shell32.exe). This is how the init sequence looks for the emulator:"Launch20"="device.dll""Depend20"=hex:06,00"Launch21"="coldinit.exe""Depend21"=hex:14,00"Launch30"="gwes.dll""Depend30"=hex:15,00"Launch35"="coreoslaunch.dll""Depend35"=hex:1E,00"Launch40"="telshell.exe""Depend40"=hex:23,00"Launch41"="ssupdate.exe""Depend41"=hex:28,00"Launch55"="dmsrv.exe""Depend55"=hex:15,00"Launch60"="servicesStart.exe""Depend60"=hex:14,00"Launch61"="ciphase2.exe""Depend61"=hex:28,00,3C,00"Launch95"="cprog.exe""Depend95"=hex:3D,00"Launch98"="EmulatorStub.exe""Depend98"=hex:14,00"Launch140"="k.mscoree3_7.dll"2....

Read More

WP7 Emulator Build 7.0.0.6077

Tonight I start looking how the new emulator is integrated in Visual Studio 2010. Using Process Explorer I saw that VS launches this command:"C:\Program Files\Microsoft XDE\1.0\XDE.exe" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\WindowsPhone\v7.0\Emulation\Images\WM70C1.bin"So the new Device Emulator changed name in XDE (version 10.0.30128.39) and we have the bin file that contains the emulator image. I then remembered that you can extract the files from a bin image, but the guys at XDA were already ahead. They made a dump of the ROM files. A lot of people...

Read More

WP7 Series - Phone Interface

Back in February I was really upset when they didn't show the phone interface of the new WP7. For me it is still the most important part of a Phone. Today, when I saw the videos published on Engadget I understood why... Not only that it looks unfinished, but it's like they didn't really start developing that part. Why did they invest a lot of work in the XBox Live hub (avatar movements with the accelerometer) and they didn't developed a decent CTP...

Read More

Sqlite for WP 7 Series - Proof of concept

I was really excited a month ago when they announced Windows Phone 7 Series, but also disappointed because it looked unfinished. Yesterday when they released a CTP for Windows Phone development I was surprised that there is no local database support (in my opinion a step backward from Windows Mobile 6.5 and an essential feature for developing business applications). What I've developed is a proof of concept application that...

Read More

My first post

This is my first post... I intend to focus on mobile development so let's write a second post more interesting...

Read More