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SmartPhone 2003 and .NETcf Primer
This article will detail my early
observations of managed coding for the SmartPhone
(SP) with the .NET Compact Framework (.NETcf). The differences
to managed coding for the PocketPC (PPC) will be pointed
out, as well as some things that are new.
Emulator
I am an early-adopter that
lives in the phone-challenged country of the USA.
Because of this I seem to always be waiting for something:
people to adopt wireless web usage, networks to be upgraded,
SMS messaging to take off, SIM card adoption, e911, decent
pocket pc phone edition hardware, and now smartphone hardware
(still waiting for a lot of these). Honestly, I dont keep
up with the hardware rumor mills at all. I did ask (mid-August
03) explicitly in the microsoft smartphone newsgroup if
there were any 2003 smartphones announced for the US ...
and the answer was no. NOTE SmartPhone 2003 is important
because it has the .NETcf and
SP1 in ROM (also CE 4.2), while SP 2002 does not and
there is currently not an install (do not know if there
will be one either). So the MS SmartPhone-in-a-box
is basically a brick for managed developers. Until
then, the
SmartPhone SDK comes with an emulator that can be used
through eVC as well as VS .NET. I recommend installing eVC
before installing the SDK for a couple reasons:
1) Running the emulator outside of
VS.NET with eVC installed adds an option to share a file
system folder between your desktop and the emulator as
a Storage Card. So if you open up the emulator, you can
see the files as if they were on the device. Currently
we do not get this feature in VS .NET.
2) eVC gives you tools to view the
file system, registry, processes, etc on the emulator.
This ends up being helpful because there is no File Explorer
on the SmartPhone OS which makes it a little more black-box'ish
than developing for the Pocket PC. It is also worth
noting that the emulator can emulate GAPI commands
as well.
Finally, the emulator can run with
an external 'radio'. From the docs, this means you
could somehow hook up a GSM radio to your desktop machine,
and the emulator would use that connection to make web service
calls and such. This would be very useful for testing your
apps ability to work with a slower connection, lost signals,
etc...
the actual phones should
not be as big as the emulator!
PocketPCs are 240x320
while SmartPhones are 176x220
the default font allows
10 lines of text with 22 characters
The following is a
dump of the directory structure on the emulator. It is different
from the PPC in that the SmartPhone RAM is erased whenever
the device is turned off. Also, in that the devices have
on-board flash which files can be persisted to. PInvoking
SHGetSpecialFolderPath with CSIDL_APPDATA (26) will
return \Storage\Application Data; you
should sub-dir off of this to store your own data. \Storage\Application
Data\Volatile sounds like it is a RAM drive
(seems like \Temp might be too)? Finally, it is
worth noting that you cannot specify how much memory is
used for Programs vs RAM as you could on the PPC.
\profiles
\profiles\default
\Storage
\Storage\Application Data
\Storage\Application Data\Home
\Storage\Application Data\Sounds
\Storage\Application Data\Volatile
\Storage\ConnMgr
\Storage\MAPI
\Storage\MAPI\ATTACHMENTS
\Storage\My Documents
\Storage\Program Files
\Storage\Program Files\Communication
\Storage\Program Files\Communication\Mail Attachments
\Storage\Program Files\Connections
\Storage\windows
\Storage\windows\Accessories
\Storage\windows\Activesync
\Storage\windows\AppMgr
\Storage\windows\ConfigMgr
\Storage\windows\Debug Apps
\Storage\windows\Favorites
\Storage\windows\Fonts
\Storage\windows\Help
\Storage\windows\Messaging
\Storage\windows\Messaging\Attachments
\Storage\windows\Profiles
\Storage\windows\Profiles\guest
\Storage\windows\Profiles\guest\Cookies
\Storage\windows\Profiles\guest\History
\Storage\windows\Profiles\guest\History\History.IE5
\Storage\windows\Profiles\guest\Temporary Internet Files
\Storage\windows\Profiles\guest\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5
\Storage\windows\registry
\Storage\windows\Start Menu
\Storage\windows\Start Menu\Accessories
\Storage\windows\Start Menu\Games
\Storage\windows\Startup
\Storage\windows\Temporary Internet Files
\Storage Card
\Temp
\Windows
The \Storage Card directory is
from a Folder Share between the desktop and the
emulator by opening the emulator outside of VS .NET
(and with eVC installed). NOTE when switching between running
the emulator through VS .NET and eVC, I sometimes have to
go and manually kill the Emulator.exe process.
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