Archive for the ‘CodeProject’ Category.

Windows Mobile 6 – Internet Explorer Mobile modes

Since IE6 comes as 6.1.4 or higher, Internet Explorer Mobile can work in IE6 or the older PIE mode.

IE6 means Internet Explorer 6 desktop compatible mode. Which works more or less with known and unknown restrictions. The biggest advantage is that Internet Explorer (IEM) >=6.1.4 supports keyboard event DOM of javascript.

For some web sites you may downgrade to PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer) mode. You will get scroll bars and a standard menu bar and no on-screen zoom option.

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Mobile development: Netstat, know your device’s open ports

On desktop PCs you have the nice tool netstat to see which ports are open on the PC. A customer wanted to know, why his devices do not release there internet connection. The only tool I know, that will show open network connections, is called netstat. Unfortunately I did not find such tool for Windows Mobile and so I wrote one myself:

netstat for windows mobile

netstatCF2

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Mobile development: pocketHosts-Edit Windows Mobile hosts entries

PocketPC and Windows Mobile does not support a hosts file as desktop windows. As I recently had to add an entry for a virtual machine running Mini SAP (Netweaver 7.01 Trial) I stumbled about how to add a host entry to a windows mobile device.

pocketHosts

The platform builder help gives the details about how host entries are organized:

Host Name

The host name can be configured through the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\Tcpip\Hosts subkey. When an application calls gethostbyname or getaddrinfo, the registry is queried first, before a DNS or WINS request is sent. If the host name is found in the registry, the registry values are returned.

The following table shows the values for the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\Tcpip\Hosts\<Host Name> subkey.

Value : type Description
Aliases : REG_MULTI_SZ This value stores the aliases by which this host is known.
ExpireTime : REG_BINARY If the current time, obtained by calling GetCurrentFT, exceeds the value in ExpireTime, the entire Host Name subkey is deleted the next time that gethostbyname is called. The length of this value is 8 bytes.
ipaddr : REG_BINARY This value stores the IPv4 addresses associated with this host name. The length of this value is 4 bytes per address.
ipaddr6 : REG_BINARY This value stores the IPv6 addresses associated with this host name. The length of this value is 20 bytes per address (16 bytes for address and 4 bytes for Scope ID).

So, there is no simple hosts file.

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Mobile Programming – Cmd line tools for automated tests

Recently I had to perform an automated stress test for a compact framework application using the camera. I remembered MortScript (original web site down) and wrote a script to automate the test.

Another way to run CLI apps and see there output is PocketConsole and PocketCMD. The original web site is down, so please use archive.org to get the files.

Now, as there are sometimes more needs to automate tests, for example for battery performance tests, I decided to mimic the motorola emScript environment. emScript offers a lot of functions you may need on other devices too. Instead of putting all functions into one executable, I decided to have extern command line driven tool set. So I started to develop small tools to perform device functions.

scannerCLI

The first tool is scannerCLI. This tool issues a barcode scan on an intermec handheld device:

Just issue the scanner for a max time of supplied arg default timeout is 1 second:
"ScannerCLI.exe x" will issue a barcode scan with a timeout of x seconds.
x must be > 0 and < 10.
"ScannerCLI.exe" will issue a barcode scan for max 1 second. The scan will be stopped immediately if a barcode is read.
The return code is 0 for no barcode read, 1 for one or more read and negative for an error in barcode scan.

iBacklIghtCLI

This tool is to control or query the backlight settings of intermec devices. As you know the backlight is one of the most battery consuming setting.

arguments  function
on         switch backlight on using current brightness
off        switch backlight off
max        switch backlight brightness to max and on
min        switch backlight brightness to min and on

state      return 0 for is OFF, 1 for ON, -1 for error
level      return current brightness level or -1 for error

1 to max level 
           set new brightness level, returns new level or -1 for 
           error (ie val exceeds max level)

More tools will added here…

The source code for all published tools is be available at code.google.com.

http://code.google.com/p/win-mobile-code/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fcli-tools