Windows CE Programming

(Updated 28. april 2010: see bottom)

If you need to print, show, generate or analyse DataMatrix Barcodes on a Windows Mobile device, you can now use this class library. I have ported the code to be compatible with Compact Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

The original full .NET framework source code is located at SourceForge.

Here is first a screenshot of the test application running on a Windows Mobile device using the DataMatrixNetCF class:

Continue reading ‘DataMatrix.Net ported to Compact Framework’ »

Bookmark It

The great site geonames.org offers some webservices. One of these is called timezone and will give you the timezone information for a given geographic Latitude and Longitude. With a GPS enabled Windows Mobile device you can so query the webservice and get timezone informations for the current location.

Unfortunately the webservice does not offer WSDL and so you have to write your own wrapper class. I wrote a small class that does the HttpWebRequest and decodes the xml reponse for easy use in your application.

Continue reading ‘Using ws.geonames.org timezone webservice without WSDL’ »

Bookmark It

Here is some nice code to use a keyboard hook implemented in C# for compact framework.

You can use this to catch the funny OS asigned keys like F1, F2, F3, F4, F6 and F7 (Softkey 1 and 2, Phone, End, Volume Up, Volume Down); and last but not least catch the Win Key press.

Continue reading ‘Hooking the keyboard message queue in compact framework code’ »

Bookmark It

PDF library iTextSharp working in Compact Framework 2: iTextSharpCF

Recently I needed a tool to combine several pictures into one file. First I thought about creating a memory bitmap and then BitBlit the source files into this single bitmap. Then I found an entry about iText and iTextSharp. This is a JAVA and .NET class library to create pdf files. As it seems very easy to use I decided to take a closer look. I found one message, where Marco states he has done a port for .NET compact framework and provided a patch to the sourceforge iTextSharp team. Unfortunately the iTextSharp team seems to ignore this port. So I started with iTextSharp and the patch to get iTextSharp running on Compact Framework.

The patch was done against version 4.0.1 of iTextSharp but there were still some rejects and some additional work to do. The main problem was the use of GetInstance where always the general WebRequest.Create(url); and then GetResponseStream() was used. A first workaround is to load the bitmap first and then provide this to doc.Add:

Continue reading ‘iTextSharp running on Compact Framework – Windows Mobile’ »

Bookmark It