Windows CE Programming

Hi

as MS does not change it, the Remote Desktop Mobile application still disconnects a session after 10 minutes idle time.

Although there is a solution for Windows Mobile 6.1 (http://www.hjgode.de/wp/2009/09/18/wm6-1-remote-desktop-client-disconnects-after-10-minutes/) based on the posting of Rafael (MS Support), this will not work with Windows Embedded Handheld (WM6.5).

The TSSHELLWND will not react on mouse_event and you have to replace the calls by SendMessage and send the WM_MOUSEMOVE to the Terminal Server Input window.

The attached application will do so but it will start only on Int*rm*c devices. It sends a mouse_move message all 4 minutes to the TS input window and so the idle timer will not timeout.

If you ever need to stop RDMKeepbusy from running in the background, you will need StopKeepBusy which is part of the executable download.

For visual control, RDMKeepbusy shows a small blinking line in the task bar:
green = Remote Desktop window found and input window is active
yellow = Remote Desktop window found, but no input window active
red = Remote Desktop window not found

DOWNLOAD:RDM Keepbusy - Windows Embedded Handheld application to avoid idle timeouts (Hits: 122, size: 8.07 kB)

Recently I needed to know, which chars (glyphs) are supported by a windows mobile font. I looked around for a charmap tool like we have on Windows Desktop PCs and was unable to find one. So I started this little tool: CharmapCF.

As you can see, you get a simple charmap and can verify what glyphs are supported and which not (square rectangle).

CharmapCF supports only UCS-2, UTF-16 as used by Microsoft’s Encoding.Unicode class. So it also only supports the Unicode Basic Multilanguage Plane (BMP).

Continue reading ‘Mobile development – A simple Unicode Character Map’ »

Recently I stumbled about this great article about ASCII, 7 and 8 Bit, codepages, Multi byte, Wide byte and unicode: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

If you ever get in trouble with wrong encoding display of chars, give this article a try to know the backgrounds.

As you know, Windows CE and Windows Mobile  is always unicode except for serial and socket communication. But the truetype fonts available on Windows Mobile devices mostly support only common chars, there file size is about 600K. The file size of Arial Unicode MS is about 22MB.

regards

Here is a simple application to connect to a serial port. The idea is based on the need of having an application to send demo print files to a virtual comm port connected to a bluetooth printer.

Update 16. March 2011: Added dialog to connect to BT printer by BT Address on Intermec devices. New source and binary at code.google.com.

Update 21. March 2011: Splitted source code and providing three different flavours:
CommAppCFSerial does serial comm only.
CommAppCFbtSearch provides BT connect (Intermec Devices only) and BT discovery
CommAppCF itself is a unstable working release
see code.google.com/p/win-mobile-code … Executables are in bin subdirs.

You can enter and send texts to or send a whole file to the port. Additionally you are able to send ASCII codes by using \xAB syntax, where AB is the hex code of the byte you would like to send.

There is nothing special with the code except the hex decoding/encoding and the possibility to send a file.

Continue reading ‘Mobile Development – Simple serial communication application’ »