Posts tagged ‘windows mobile’

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

Windows Mobile 6.5: Changed Screen Geometry

Screen layout changes from Windows Mobile 6.1 to Windows Mobile Embedded Handheld 6.5

The Windows Mobile screen geometry changed from Windows Mobile 6.1 and before to the actual Windows Mobile 6.5 (also called Windows Embedded Handheld). Not only the geometry changed, the layout also changed. The Start icon is now moved to the bottom whereas before WM65 the start icon was on the left in the taskbar.

wm61screen   wm65screen

The taskbar and the menubar was about 26 pixels in height. With WM65 the taskbar is about 18 pixels in height and the menu bar occupies 34 pixels in height.

QVGA screen geometry

Windows Mobile 6.1

Windows Mobile 6.5

taskbar

26

18

menubar

26

34

client size

240;268

240;268

client size height no taskbar

240;294

240;302

client size height no menubar

240;294

240;286

You can see that assuming a fixed client size will give problems with the layout of the application, especially if menubar and taskbar height are assumed as being 26 pixels all the time.

Applications that only use the client size with the taskbar and menubar visible, will show normally, as the resulting client size does not differ between WM61 and WM65.

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