Kevin Daly

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is on MSDN

Just thought you might like to know.

Where's the Visual Studio patch for .NETCF2 SP2?

Back in March the redistributable for the .NET Compact Framework v2 SP 2 was released. As usual the team blog listed the various er, variations and so on with links to be added as the appropriate releases became available.

These have all now been filled in - with the exception of the patch for Visual Studio 2005.

As a developer this is a big deal for me - I have been delaying installing the refresh of the Windows Mobile 6 SDK (which lists .NETCF2 SP2 as a prerequisite) precisely because I don't want to find myself with a version which I have to uninstall and replace in order to be able to test and deploy correctly from Visual Studio.

With SP1 a big deal was made about having to apply the VS2005 patch and how you would have to uninstall the redistributable if you'd installed it first, and the fact that a patch is listed at all on the blog page implies that the same is true (or intended to be true) for SP2.

 

So Compact Framework Team, where is it?

Silverlight for Windows Mobile - Some items from my wish list

Silverlight for Windows Mobile looks like it's (unfortunately) a good way out, or possibly something that might never see daylight.
Still, there's been a little preview and it looks pretty nifty.

I really, really hope Microsoft deliver it in a form that can run standalone applications (i.e. without having to be deployed from a web server), and with the Silverlight runtime using the full .NET CF 3.5 (I assume) runtime.
I also hope of course that they deliver it within my professional lifetime :)

The UI options for Compact Framework developers are pretty dire: without writing interop code or giving up and just going native, you're limited to something that largely has the visual polish of VB5. It's not pretty.

Silverlight on the other hand gives us the opportunity to create flexible, imaginative and frankly gorgeous UI. It's a shame that it doesn't include the advanced Panel features of WPF (because that would be a handy answer to the horror of resolution and orientation awareness), but some compromises are inevitable. It would still be a huge step forward, and I'd love to see it available as an option for the generality of device applications.

Last but not least, Silverlight+.NET CF+thousands of developers using an application-friendly(-ish) platform enables a good response to the iPhone (if nothing else the iPhone does raise expectations for mobile UI, and we won't be able to get away with more of the same old same old).

 

Diarist 2 for Pocket PC released

(UPDATE 07/04/2007: Another refresh. This time thanks go to Stefan Stranger for noticing that nothing was happening when adding a blog where it was selected from a list of several hosted on the same site. When I checked I found the event handler had got unhooked at some stage. So embarrassing.)

(UPDATE 04/04/2007:The version I posted last night did not handle VGA displays correctly, as Juan Gomez alerted me this morning. I've now posted an updated version of the CAB file)

This version is updated for (and requires) .NET Compact Framework 2.

Unfortunately I've had to drop Blogger  support (I think I've warned everybody enough about that now), but there is a nice collection of new features.

Read more about it here, or just go to my web site to download it.

Or alternatively of course, you could just do something else completely. It's entirely up to you, I won't mind.

 

Now I can put some serious time into WPF and other nifty things.

Where's Device Emulator 2.0 RTM?

This has been in beta since the first half of last year, so why has no RTM download been made available by now?

Version 2.0 is needed to cradle the emulator under Vista, so its non-release is preventing my definitive move over to the nice shiny new Vista machine (I don't want to install yet another beta that I'll only have to uninstall later at the cost of God knows how much mental and emotional trauma...not to mention the ickiness that always ensues when bits of beta installations persist in remote and hidden locations after you install the final product. It's not pretty).

 

So anyway, how about it?

Update: 25.03.07
Well, my query was effectively answered not long after I wrote that post, since the emulator was released with the Windows Mobile 6 SDK and then subsequently as a standalone.
So I'm happy.

New Site

I now once again have a non-blog presence online: www.kevdaly.co.nz.

Currently there isn't much there, but I intend (no really, cross my heart and swear to get really drunk otherwise) to post a few articles and things before long.
Importantly for those who have an interest in my mobile blogging work, it means there's once again a download site for Diarist.

And just a reminder: the latest version fully supports MSN Spaces (and Blogger Atom support should be fixed as well).
It's currently a very sparse download page without anything in the way of explanatory text, but I'll deal with that shortly.

Yet more on Diarist with MSN Spaces

OK, I've been trying it for a few days now, and it's definitely working fine now without trying to use the local network setting - so I'm confident that that was simply a business-as-usual Connection Manager glitch connected with the fact that I was using it at one point while the device was cradled and I was getting screen shots of the configuration screen.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that if you're interested, contact me and I'll send you the latest version to try.

About the new-look MSDN Subscriber Downloads area: am I the only person who really, really hates that incredibly slow, unresponsive treeview?

In other news: I've been testing my RSS generation code with both RSS Bandit and SharpReader lately. Once I've got my site up I'll be using it to provide notifications of software updates (as mentioned previously).

Diarist and MetaWeblog for MSN Spaces

Update 11:08 pm - the problem below did recur - it looks very much like the Harrier decided I was using a local network connection, so I set my local network settings to also be Telecom CDMA, and that seems to have taken care of it. I'll keep testing for another day or two to make sure.

The blogging API for MSN Spaces went live today (-ish...depending on your time zone).
I naturally tested it with Diarist - there was a bug I had to correct before the SSL would work (actually it was a bug in CF 1.0, but it requires a workaround). It looks as if everything's OK...for a while I was getting errors trying to connect from my Harrier (just saying it couldn't connect to the remote server), but I'm not getting them now so unless there's a recurrence I'll put it down to "transient network conditions" (TNC, if you must).
Other than those initial hiccups (and with my fingers crossed against a recurrence of the last) I'm quite pleased: things like dates and categories that often have issues worked perfectly right away.

In addition to fixing the SSL issue, I've also changed the default address for Blogger via Atom to be https (they seem to have finally got around to requiring that while I wasn't looking), and to avoid too much inconvenience with changes like that in future I've made API addresses that default (such as Blogger)  editable.
In addition I've added a menu option for MSN Spaces, so people won't have to key in the address.

I'll make the Spaces-friendly version available as soon as it's fully tested and I'm confident it won't suddenly fall over, but for the next week or two you'll have to ask me for a copy via the Contact form and I'll email you the CAB file - the plug gets pulled on my free hosting on www.aspxconnection.com tomorrow, so there won't be anywhere to download from until I've made alternative arrangements (as soon as possible).

For the same reason I've removed the download links and images from some of the posts I've made here, since they were linked to the same site.
When my hosting is taken care of I'll tidy up and republish some of the better ones as proper articles on the new site.

Download link for mobile blogging application (Diarist)

Anyone who wants a copy of this, please use this link for now to grab the CAB file directly    contact me and I'll send you the cab file.
My ASP.NET hosting site is currently pretty comprehensively broken, it appears that all the sub-sites hosted there may be affected, it may have been that way for about a week, and there is no sign to date that the site administrators are taking the slightest bit of notice. So for now, don't bother trying to get to http://kevdaly.aspxconnection.com, unless you're a connoisseur of the Yellow Screen of Death (since the site's file manager is broken (like the database manager...it just goes on and on) I used Visual Studio 2003 to re-upload my whole project with a version of the Web.config that doesn't suppress debugging messages, so you can enjoy the stack trace in all its glory).

Have I mentioned I'm not happy?

PS. This is not a new version of Diarist, so if you've downloaded it recently you don't need to grab it again. I'm just posting the CAB link for the benefit of anyone who tries the link to the site and gets the aforementioned YSD.

Tech Ed NZ 2005 Day 1

I just got my hands on an HTC Universal at the Vodafone booth. It's much lighter than I expected, and not as bulky as it looks in photos. The keyboard is very nice, and has two special keys mapped as soft keys. Oddly enough I couldn't find anything equivalent in portrait mode, but further exploration might reveal something.
I definitely want one of those.
On the subject of actual conference content: I like the enhancements to the Event Log in Windows Vista. Being able to trigger tasks from events will be very helpful.

Diarist v1.1 Released

The latest version of my blogging application for Pocket PC can be downloadedIf you'd like to try it, ask for a copy via the Contact form - I'm currently between hosters.

Update for Community Server Users:
I've just discovered that the structure used to pass credentials to the web service changed between 1.0 and 1.1.
If you're a 1.1 user you will therefore have problems with the web service option right now - I'm working on this and hope to post an update soon.

Update to the Update:
I've just posted an amended version which takes care of this problem.
It provides separate menu options for v1.0 and v1.1 of Community Server (including on the switch menu).

I tried to think of something clever to do with the WSDL to solve the issue, but ended up adding another proxy <grrrrr>.