We only have one more day left in our 30 days of .NET [Windows Mobile Applications]. Where do we go from here?

I’m really happy with the 30 Days of .NET so I do think I will continue that in one format or another for some time. It’s been a blast. And everyone knows my passion for Windows Mobile programming so we keep finding way to work that in there as well.

I haven’t quite decided what I’ll do for next month but I’m sure it’ll only get better as we move forward.

There have been a lot of request for applications that haven’t made it on deck yet, and obviously they aren’t all going to get done tomorrow. But I think I’ll be able to throw in some Bonus Day of .NET or Return of Day of .NET and knock some of them out over time.

My goal is to take all the existing content and clean it up some and make more through and detailed learning materials to really help beginners take off with Windows Mobile.

Hope you’ll join me on the road ahead…

Wow, it’s hard to believe the month is almost over already. So far we have 29 applications done in 29 days! Thank you for all your encouragement.

If you missed the week one recap here it is: 30 Days of .NET [Windows Mobile Applications] - Week One.

If you missed the week two recap here it is: 30 Days of .NET [Windows Mobile Applications] - Week Two.

If you missed the week three recap here it is: 30 Days of .NET [Windows Mobile Applications] - Week Three.

What’s your favorite?

GPS Clock	MobileInfo	Mobile Flashlight	SmartDial

Let see we have a time utility, and device information, call blocker, and lots more!

GeoCash	Repeatr	CallBlocker	What will be next?

Feedback:

Got an idea? Got some feedback? Share it? Thanks!

 A friend, a coworker, and an all-around great guy, Page Brooks, has created a contest for building controls for Silverlight.

Here’s the highlights:

"Welcome to the Silverlight Control Builder Contest! With this contest, we hope to incite the development of many open and free Silverlight Controls that all developers can use in their applications, and what better way to do this than through a friendly contest! This contest is your chance to demonstrate your control building skills to the Silverlight community and win some pretty cool prizes at the same time!"

Check out the prizes:

1st Place

• 1-Year MSDN Premium Subscription (Not for Resale)
• Your choice of one book from the entire O'Reilly catalog

2nd Place

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition
• Your choice of one book from the entire O'Reilly catalog
  

3rd Place

• Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date from O'Reilly
• Your choice of one book from the entire O'Reilly catalog

Great opportunity to build a little fame and win some great prizes. Find out more after the jump: http://gosilverlight.org/

Only One Day Left…

Not too long ago Page Brooks and myself made the three and a half hour drive from Florence, SC to Greensboro, NC to attend the Ineta Carolina Community Leadership Summit '08. This was a great event and there we meet a lot of the local Ineta user group leaders. We also meet Andrew Duthie, aka DEvHammer. One issue that rose to the top of things we wanted to work on improving at the leadership summit was awareness of events that are occurring in the local regional area. That’s when Andrew told everyone about the project he has been working on: Community Megaphone.

I love have information at my fingertips, so I decided to write a tie-in application:

Community Megaphone Reader

Basically, this application connects to the Community Megaphone RSS feed and pulls down event data. Then it takes your current GPS position and calculates your distance from each event. Finally, it takes all the events and sorts then so you can find the event that is the closest to you. This is a great application for the traveling .NET geek. Where ever you are you can find great .NET events to attend.

The UI is paying homage to Andrew’s Community Megaphone site. I tried to match the basic colors to keep it familiar. The hyperlinks are active and will take you the event’s page on Community Megaphone. The menu only has a few options: Refresh, About, and Exit.

An application like this is really exciting, because it is tying the world of mobile together with the world wide web.

These types of mashup applications will contitue to take of for years.

LoadRss Method

   1: public static DataSet LoadRss(string requestUriString)

   2: {

   3:     HttpWebRequest feed = HttpWebRequest.Create(requestUriString) as HttpWebRequest;

   4:     StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(feed.GetResponse().GetResponseStream());

   5:  

   6:     string rssXml = streamReader.ReadToEnd();

   7:     rssXml = rssXml.Replace(@"<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""utf-8""?>", string.Empty);

   8:  

   9:     StringReader stringReader = new StringReader(rssXml);

  10:  

  11:     DataSet dataSet = new DataSet();

  12:     dataSet.ReadXml(stringReader);

  13:  

  14:     return dataSet;

  15: }

GetEvents Method

   1: public static List<Item> GetEvents(DataSet dataSet, GpsPosition gpsPosition)

   2: {

   3:     List<Item> items = new List<Item>();

   4:  

   5:     foreach (DataRow dataRow in dataSet.Tables["item"].Rows)

   6:     {

   7:         Item item = new Item();

   8:         item.Title = (string)dataRow["title"];

   9:         item.Description = (string)dataRow["description"];

  10:         item.Link = (string)dataRow["link"];

  11:         item.PublishDate = DateTime.Parse((string)dataRow["pubDate"]);

  12:         item.Latitude = Double.Parse((string)dataRow["lat"]);

  13:         item.Longitude = Double.Parse((string)dataRow["long"]);

  14:  

  15:         if(gpsPosition.LatitudeValid && gpsPosition.LongitudeValid)

  16:             item.Distance = GeoCodeCalc.CalcDistance(gpsPosition.Latitude, gpsPosition.Longitude, item.Latitude, item.Longitude);

  17:  

  18:         items.Add(item);

  19:     }

  20:  

  21:     items.Sort(delegate(Item item1, Item item2)

  22:     {

  23:         return item1.Distance.CompareTo(item2.Distance);

  24:     });

  25:  

  26:     return items;

  27: }

Display Events Method

   1: public static string DisplayEvents(List<Item> events)

   2: {

   3:     StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

   4:  

   5:     foreach (Item item in events)

   6:     {

   7:         stringBuilder.Append(@"<span style=""color: #FFFFFF;font-weight:bold;"">");

   8:         stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"<a href=""{0}"" style=""color: #DBB94F;"">{1}</a><br/><br/>", item.Link, item.Title);

   9:         stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"{0}<br/><br/>", item.Description);

  10:         stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"<b>Distance: <span style=""color: #DBB94F;"">{0} miles</span></b><br/>", item.Distance.ToString("0.00"));

  11:         // stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"<b>{0}</b><br/>", item.PublishDate);

  12:         // stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"{0}<br/>", item.Latitude);

  13:         // stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"{0}<br/>", item.Longitude);

  14:         stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"<br/><br/>");

  15:         stringBuilder.Append(@"</span>");

  16:     }

  17:  

  18:     return stringBuilder.ToString();

  19: }

Possibilities:

Andrew recently added iCalendar file support to Community Megaphone. This would be a great feature to add to a Windows Mobile application, and it is totally doable. The HTML could be a little more fancy maybe even use a few 16x16 fonts for a little personality.

Download executable: communityMegaphoneReader.cab

Download Source Code: communityMegaphoneReader.zip

Feedback:

Want more? What else would you like to see? Time’s running out only one more day. Be sure to get your ideas in soon!

Only 2 Days Left…

Today’s application is CallBlock. It is designed to watch incoming calls, and check and see if they match any on the block phone numbers list. If they do match then the phone is “blocked”.

CallBlock

The first thing you should notice is the flashy logo at the top of the form. I create this logo with an online 3D logo generator. The one simple touch adds a lot of professional polish to the application. I really like red and white so I didn’t change the background color this time. But I am starting to wish I had. It seems a little “blah” to me now.

Next we have our phone number input text box. The user enters the phone number here, and presses the Block menu item to add it to the block number list below. On the main menu we also have options to Unblock, and Unblock All. And we have our almost universal About and Exit menu items.

There are two main pieces to this application. One part is the State and Notification Broker code to give us an event to catch incoming phone calls.

I actually got myself painted into a corner, I assumed you could just programmatically ignore of phone call but it isn’t that simple. Fortunately, a good friend of mine, Lou Vega, came up with a very slick workaround for this. And that is the second part which is the keybd_event method that allows us to send keypresses to the OS to Ignore the phone call.

CallBlock Core Code

   1: const int KEYEVENTF_KEYDOWN = 0x0;

   2: const int KEYEVENTF_KEYUP = 0x2;

   3:  

   4: [DllImport("coredll.dll", EntryPoint = "keybd_event", SetLastError = true)]

   5: internal static extern void keybd_event(byte bVk, byte bScan, int dwFlags, int dwExtraInfo);

   6:  

   7: SystemState phoneIncomingCall = new SystemState(SystemProperty.PhoneIncomingCall);

   8: private void frmMain_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

   9: {

  10:     phoneIncomingCall.Changed += new ChangeEventHandler(phoneIncomingCall_Changed);

  11: }

  12:  

  13: void phoneIncomingCall_Changed(object sender, ChangeEventArgs args)

  14: {

  15:     string phoneNumber = RemoveText(SystemState.PhoneIncomingCallerNumber);

  16:  

  17:     if(listBoxBlockedNumbers.Items.Contains(phoneNumber))

  18:     {

  19:         keybd_event(115, 0, KEYEVENTF_KEYDOWN, 0);

  20:         keybd_event(115, 0, KEYEVENTF_KEYUP, 0);

  21:     }

  22: }

Possibilities:

It would be easy to add support for blocking SMS text messages as well. We’ve done all the code for this already in previous applications. Also the application could really use a persistent data store to remember number to block in case the user closes the application. It would be nice to allow user formatting of entered phone numbers for increased readability.

Download executable: callBlock.cab

Download Source Code: callBlock.zip

Feedback:

Want more? What else would you like to see? Time’s running out on submitting ideas. Be sure to get yours in soon!

So Page Brooks was talking with me earlier this week and he had a great idea for another Windows Mobile application. He wants an application that will repeat alerts for missed phones and text messages. I have to admit this is something I could use myself. So I figured I take a crack at it today, since it would make for a fun, simple, Friday app.

Repeatr

I decided to change up the naming format and play of the popular Web 2.0 naming conventions giving us the name: Repeatr. I have to admit, it is kind of catchy.

I searched for “Web 2.0 Logo Creator” and pretty much went with the first one I saw. This gave me a pretty slick logo in less than 5 minutes. I also decided to make the background a “tooltip” yellow, which I think looks really good.

Other than that everything is rather straight forward. We have checkboxes allowing the user to choose what events we will monitor. And we have a menu with a couple options, namely About and Exit. There is a “Clear Alerts” menu item, as well, that allows users to acknowledge they have responded to the alert(s).

The application allows user to select the number of minutes between alerts up to 60 minutes.

Of course we are using the State and Notification Broker to make all this happen. Using it means we hardly have to write any code ourselves!

State and Notification Broker setup code

   1: SystemState phoneMissedCalls = new SystemState(SystemProperty.PhoneMissedCalls);

   2: SystemState messagingSmsUnread = new SystemState(SystemProperty.MessagingSmsUnread);

   3: SystemState messagingTotalEmailUnread = new SystemState(SystemProperty.MessagingTotalEmailUnread);

   4: SystemState messagingVoiceMailTotalUnread = new SystemState(SystemProperty.MessagingVoiceMailTotalUnread);

   5:  

   6: private void frmMain_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

   7: {

   8:     phoneMissedCalls.Changed += new ChangeEventHandler(phoneMissedCalls_Changed);

   9:     messagingSmsUnread.Changed += new ChangeEventHandler(messagingSmsUnread_Changed);

  10:     messagingTotalEmailUnread.Changed += new ChangeEventHandler(messagingTotalEmailUnread_Changed);

  11:     messagingVoiceMailTotalUnread.Changed += new ChangeEventHandler(messagingVoiceMailTotalUnread_Changed);

  12: }

The way we alert a user to having missed a monitored event is by playing a sounds which is easy to do.

   1: [DllImport("aygshell.dll")]

   2: static extern uint SndPlaySync(string pszSoundFile, uint dwFlags);

   3:  

   4: void PlaySound()

   5: {

   6:     string path;

   7:     path = Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().CodeBase);

   8:  

   9:     SndPlaySync(Path.Combine(path, "alert.wma"), 0);

  10: }

Other than a little plumbing to make everything work together that is basically the entire app in a nutshell.

Possibilities:

This is a pretty spiffy application. But software can always be better. An option to allow the phone to vibrate would be great. Another option to allow the user to select the alert sound would be nice too.

Download executable: repeatr.cab

Download Source Code: repeatr.zip

Feedback:

Want more? What else would you like to see? Time’s running out on submitting ideas. Be sure to get yours in soon!

4 Days left…

Today on twitter, Glen Gordon was telling me that Brendon Schwartz had an idea for today’s application:

glengordon @cjcraft here's an idea for a mobile app that @brendonschwartz will like - record $ spent during the day and where it was spent (with GPS) about 13 hours ago from Witty in reply to CJCraft

It’s a really good idea. Probably a better idea than we will be able to do it tonight, but we are all about taking the first small steps to accomplishing great things.

GeoCash

I love the name, it is a play on GeoCaching. Somehow it adds a lot of “buzz” to the application already.

The application is designed to be easy for the user to use and understand. The user only needs to enter the amount they spent along with a note, and then simply press log and it will be added to the GeoCash log.

We are using our own NumericTextBox to be sure the user doesn’t enter in any invalid amounts spent. We have another standard TextBox for the note input. Below this we have the log information. This is done using a WebBrowser control, and setting its DocumentText property.

The main reason to use the WebBrowser control is to be able to do a little better text formatting. This allowed us to easily markup our text in bold and color.

 

HTML formatted output:

   1: sb.AppendFormat(@"<b>Date:</b> {0}", DateTime.Now).Append("<br/>");

   2: sb.AppendFormat(@"<b>Amount:</b> <span style=""color:red"">{0:c}</span>", decimal.Parse(textBoxAmountSpent.Text)).Append("<br/>");

   3: sb.AppendFormat(@"<b>Note:</b> {0}", textBoxNote.Text).Append("<br/>");

   4: sb.AppendFormat(@"<b>Latitude:</b> {0}", position.Latitude).Append("<br/>");

   5: sb.AppendFormat(@"<b>Longitude:</b> {0}", position.Longitude).Append("<br/>");

   6: sb.Append("<br/>");

   7:  

   8: documentText += sb.ToString();

   9: webBrowser.DocumentText = documentText;

Possibilities:

I love this app. It has so many cool possibilities. You could easily save this information to a text file or sent it as an email. I think this is perfect data to do a mashup on for example create a heatmap etc for it so you can see the “dangerous” side of town you need to avoid taking your money into from now on.

Download executable: geoCash.cab

Download Source Code: geoCash.zip

Feedback:

Want more? What else would you like to see? Time’s running out on submitting ideas. Be sure to get yours in soon!

5 Days Left…

So when you are talking Windows Mobile Applications you are usually talking about a cell phone device. We have looked at text messages using SMS, but one thing we haven’t look at so far is programmatically making phone calls. Today we will take a look at creating our own phone dialer application. It’s easier than you think!

SmartDial

I think the UI is pretty nice, not the best, but good overall. It is bright and clean. I found a web site that allowed me to create buttons in a snap and used it for the numbers. At the top of the screen, I added a label to display the number to dial. The menu only has a few options: Dial, Menu, Clear, About, and Exit.

Since we only allow users to enter numbers using our custom buttons, we don’t have to worry about anyone entering invalid characters.

So how much code did we as Windows Mobile application developers have to write to actually dial a number? See for yourself.

   1: private void Dial()