Today’s application is about possibilities. It’s a new area we will explore in our future applications. It’s important to learn how to development applications, but it is also important to learn what kind of applications you can develop. Your goal is always to reach just a little further, and grow from the experience.

The important thing here isn’t what this application does with these ideas, but what you could do with these ideas.

People can use SMS to send and receive information through text messages, but with the power of Windows Mobile it is easy for application to send and receive commands and data. There is a big movement for software to expose its features and functions to other programs. But image a world, that probably isn’t too far, where your mobile device has it’s own API that you and others can use to access its data and functions.

Where could this be useful? Well many companies need the ability to send “Alerts” of some kind to their workers. It is easy to use the Windows Mobile SMS API to have a custom written application that check for specially “tagged” SMS messages.

Mobile SMS Remote

SMS Remote is an application that could run on two or more Windows Mobile device and allow each of the phones run to support “commands” on the phones. For example, a user could get the date and time of another device running SMS Remote. Or the user could run a command to get the other phone’s current GPS location information. The possibilities are limitless. Both devices are both servers and both clients in other words a very simple peer-to-peer network using SMS technology. How cool is that?

What if sometimes we don’t want others to be able to run commands on our device remotely? First of all we could always exit the application. The application must be running in other to execute remote commands. Be I have also added an “Allow Remote Commands” feature.

How can we send SMS remote commands? Use the SMS command ComboBox and choose a command, and enter the remote device’s phone number. Then just click “Send”.

How can we tell what commands have been remotely run on our device? There is a received commands listing at the bottom the screen. It shows the phone number of the device that send the command, the time the command arrive, and which command was requested.

This is a rough prototype of an idea that has HUGE potential. Some point in the next ten years this concept will take off and become something along the lines of Mobile 2.0.

The trick to this application is using the very cooly named Windows Mobile 6.0 SDK MessageInterceptor class. We can use it to have any SMS that begins with “30days:” fire an event in our application that we will then handle. This is very, very, very simple for something so powerful. Use it!

   1: MessageInterceptor _smsInterceptor = null;

   2: private void LoadSmsIntercepter()

   3: {

   4:     _smsInterceptor = new MessageInterceptor(InterceptionAction.NotifyAndDelete);

   5:  

   6:     _smsInterceptor.MessageCondition =

   7:         new MessageCondition(MessageProperty.Subject,

   8:         MessagePropertyComparisonType.StartsWith, "30days:", true);

   9:     _smsInterceptor.MessageReceived += SmsInterceptor_MessageReceived;

  10: }

The rest is simple. Was the SMS a “command” or a “result”? If command we need to run and return a result. If result we need to act on or display to device user.

Possibilities:

I implemented the get date and time function, but not the GPS function. This would be a very useful addition to the application that I would love to say a reader did. Or how about a way to add Internet Explorer Mobile favorites? Or how about something more Web 2.0 like what song is currently playing.

Download executable: mobileSMSRemote.cab

Download Source Code: mobileSMSRemote.zip

Feedback:

So what possibilities do you see for this type of application? for business? for entertainment?