Orientation Aware Control June 2008 RC Trial Edition available for download!

Some time ago the best way to deal with screen rotation in your mobile application was to detect it programmatically and re-layout the screen at runtime, moving and resizing the controls and even changing their content manually, or directly showing a different view with a completely different layout according to the new orientation. An easier option was to use anchoring and docking, which could be good enough in a few cases, but not in most of them. This challenge was not easy at all, and that was the reason because many developers decided to directly forget screen rotation and delivery applications that are almost unusable when the screen is rotated.

What about applications which should run on devices with different form factors? Once again, anchoring and docking are not enough. Remember that in a mobile application you should design your UI thinking from the scratch in order to take full advantage of the screen and maximize the user experience.

One of the main advantages of using Visual Studio 2005/2008 and the .Net Compact Framework is the design-time experience which is great for a single form-factor / orientation, but it's almost useless when you need to design a solution thinking on a really outstanding mobile user experience.

When we worked on the Microsoft Patterns & Practices Mobile Client Software Factory, this challenge was part of our focus, and the need for a design-time experience in order to support rotation and multiple form factors was the goal. The former Orientation Aware Control was the first approach towards this goal. It's indeed part of the Mobile Client Software Factory, and by extending the Localization feature of the Visual Studio designer it provides a design-time approach for supporting screen rotation and multiple form-factors for Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC and Visual Studio 2005. It is, in fact, one of the most popular application blocks of the MCSF, and it has changed the way in what .Net Compact Framework developers should deal with screen rotation and multiple form factors support.

Last year, Clarius Consulting released a new and improved Orientation Aware Control including support for Pocket PC 2003 and Windows CE 5.0. It was developed by the same people who worked on the MCSF Orientation Aware Control lead by Daniel Cazzulino. Unfortunately, this version was released before Orcas, and it didn't include any support for Visual Studio 2008, which was one of the most required features for the next version.

I'm glad to announce that we've just published the Orientation Aware Control June 2008 RC Trial Edition!! This is a new preview of the June Release Candidate, fully functional with a trial message at runtime. This version does include Visual Studio 2008 design-time support! and several bug fixes and improvements. It's good to know that this version works with both VS2005 and VS2008, and it includes support for .Net Compact Framework 2.0 and 3.5!

What are you waiting for? Go ahead and download it! Your feedback will be very appreciated!

How to allow minimize being in a modal dialog on Pocket PC using the .Net CF

An interesting question came up today at the Mobility Metro train the trainers workshop in London: How can we allow the Pocket PC user to minimize the application even when he is in a modal dialog?

This is a particular requirement received by an attendee, and it was a little bit challenging problem. I did a small spike on this, and this is my suggested approach.

First of all, we cannot use Form.ShowDialog(), because it shows the 'OK' button at the top right corner, and ideally we should keep the standard 'X' smart minimize button there.

The solution is to use Form.Show() and handle the Form.Closed event of the dialog. We also should take care of the dialog Owner property in order to show only one entry on the Running Programs List.

private void menuItem1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Dialog dialog = new Dialog();
    
    //Prepare the app to be 'Running Programs Aware'
    this.Text = dialog.Text;
    dialog.Owner = this;
    
    //Subscribe to the dialog closed event
    dialog.Closed += delegate(object s2, EventArgs e2)
    {
        //Do something when the dialog is closed
        label1.Text = string.Format("DialogResult = {0}", dialog.DialogResult.ToString());
        //Update the form text back
        this.Text = "MainForm";
    };
    dialog.Show();
}

Here you can find the spike sourcecode:

• AllowMinimizeDialog sample code (~12K)

 

 

Going back to London for Microsoft Mobility Metro 2008 Train The Trainers (TTT)

Well, I'm glad to say that I've been invited to be instructor in the Microsoft Mobility Metro "Train the Trainers" in UK. It will be my second time in London and I'm sure it'll be as great as the previous one was.

This will be a three days mobility training targeting european instructors audience, that will start on March 18th. The agenda includes several topics, starting with Windows Mobile platform concepts, moving thru the tools, managed code for devices, SQL Compact Edition, Optimization and guidance, and an interesting review of what's coming on in mobile development. Hope to see some of you there.

These days are very busy for me, but I'll try to keep blogging. Stay tuned!

Looking for an OpenFileDialog for Smartphone? Porting the MobilePractices.OpenFileDialogEx from PocketPC to Smartphone

This morning I've ported the MobilePractices.OpenFileDialogEx custom implementation of the OpenFileDialog to smartphone. Strictly, I've ported it to Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition. And I want to remark that Smartphone doesn't even support the standard OpenFileDialog. If you try to use the standard version a NotSupportedException is raised. So I thought this port should be extremely useful, and it's additionally fully implemented using the .Net Compact Framework (.Net CF).

The port was pretty much straightforward, besides the expected design constrains. It took me exactly 75 minutes. What were the main issues I have during the process? First of all, the need to make it usable in the smartphone platform. It doesn't make sense to have the same structure with one combo box, the list, and the textbox at the bottom. So, my design decision was to leave the list. I know you may have a new smartphone device which has a qwerty keyboard, but I think it still being the simplest option just to browse the file system. Actually I used to do that even in my laptop. And if I keep the textbox, it'll leave less space for the list, and I think that's critical here. Anyway, if you prefer you can bring the textbox back from the pocket pc version.

The second main issue was how to provide the quick go back to any directory on the current path without the combo box. I've decided to implement this using the right menu, the same way File Explorer does.

It looks this way in the Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition emulator:

Not bad! But it still being just a starting point. There are many features missing which you probably will find critical in your app. As you can probably noticed, the file list is not sorted, there are no InitialDirectory property, and it doesn't cached any directory info to improve the performance during the browsing. Feel free to add any feature you want. The source code is here:

• MobilePractices.OpenFileDialogEx.Smartphone Sourcecode (~19k)

A custom OpenFileDialog implementation that browses the full file system: MobilePractices.OpenFileDialogEx

Doing a spike yesterday I had the need to use OpenFileDialog to browse and select an existing file. The problem was that I placed the files on the device root. And oops! the Windows Mobile implementation of the OpenFileDialog, this is not a .Net Compact Framework limitation, doesn't allow the user to browse the root. Actually, it doesn't allow the user to browse the whole file system, it just let you browse My Documents subfolders and Storage cards. Very bothering in some cases.

Indeed, this is not the first time I have to deal with it. An I thought I should be just one of many developers with the same problem. So I decided to implement a custom OpenFileDialog in c# targeting PocketPC, but easily portable to Smartphone, and customizable and extensible as well. Wow! I think I should have said that first of all, it's a very simple piece of code. And that's its best feature. You can use it as a starting point.

I've not implemented the full Filter feature of the original OpenFileDialog because I think it's not a common scenario on mobile development and it make the UI overcrowded. Instead, the Filter property of my MobilePractices.OpenFileDialogEx implementation, is just a search pattern.

The MobilePractices.OpenFileDialogEx looks this way:

The dialog title can be changed as you wish thru the Text property. At the top of the screen, you can see a ComboBox which can be used to quickly go back to an specific folder.

Taking a look at the first snapshot you can notice that I'm identifying storage cards with a different icon. To identify a storage card you can check if the FileInfo.Attributes for it are Directory and Temporary.

if ((info.Attributes & (FileAttributes.Directory | FileAttributes.Temporary))
    == (FileAttributes.Directory | FileAttributes.Temporary))
    return FileSystemKind.StorageCard;

How to continue with this is up to you. You can add an InitialDirectory property, or some way to keep the current path along the application run, or a modified version which allows you to select a directory instead of a file. Or you can take the code and port it to smartphone. Probably I'll do that soon in a new post. Once more, this is just a starting point!

Here you have the source code including a sample application:

• OpenFileDialogSample.SourceCode.zip (aprox.19kb)

Enjoy!

Working with forms: How to hide the 'x' button or show an 'ok' button instead

A very common question when you start to work with forms and the .Net Compact Framework is how to replace the 'x' button on the title bar with an 'ok' button. By default, a new form is created showing an 'x' button, which is a minimize box on the title bar:

 

In runtime, it behaves as a minimize button, when the user press this button the form is minimized. Sometimes we prefer to replace this button with an 'ok' button, as in a dialog. This is very easy. Just open the form on design mode and change the MinimizeBox property to false:

Now we have a new 'ok' button which will close the form in runtime setting the form DialogResult property to DialogResult.OK

If you want to hide both buttons, you can set the ControlBox property of the form to false.

Now the form doesn't have any buttons on the title bar.

Indeed, all these from properties can be changed programmatically from your code. It's really easy! Isn't it?

How to deploy the .Net Compact Framework and SQL Server Compact Edition

If we've developed a .Net Compact Framework application, we'll need to have the .Net CF installed on the device before the application is launched. It's the same case if we're using SQL Server Compact Edition, it should be installed on the device or our application will not able to open the database. So very obvious, but so very important. It's particularly important when we're designing a deployment strategy.

We already know how to create a .cab installer for the application, but we also know that there is no way to define dependencies in a cabinet file. We cannot say that OurApp.cab depends on the compact framework cab files and/or the SQLSCE cab installer.

And how can we do it?

During the development process, Visual Studio deploys both components to the device/emulator when needed, but this is not a feasible method when your app has been brought to production. We need to check manually if the .Net CF and SQLSCE are installed on the device and deploy them if needed. I suggest the following options to do this:

1) Using a desktop Installer

*If a desktop installer is an option* in your scenario, you can build an MSI which register the .cab installers, and using ActiveSync/WMDC checks if it's necessary to deploy and install each one. You can take a look at this very helpful article by Stan Adermann explaining how to create an MSI Package that detects and updates the .Net Compact Framework. Nice stuff.

2) Using a third party update library

You can use a library like the Q4Tech Mobile Updater Application Block which is an open source library which can be customized according with your scenario, or some similar one.

3) Create a light-weight native installer

You can create a native application (i.e. using Visual C++) which will be installed on the device and should check whether the .Net CF is already installed, get the cab if needed, and launch it. Once the .Net CF is installed it can continue updating SQLSCE and the app assemblies. An alternative is just use this native installer to install a new managed installer application which can do the remaining work.
This option needs also a server-side component to publish the .cab installers to the native client. It can be in its minimal version just a web server publishing the .cab files.

You can choose the option which fits better on your scenario, and probably another good option for you can be to use third-party products or if you want, you can even include separate framework files on your .cab file, but it needs lot of work and it will carries on with security problems if you need to sign your application.

As you can see, deployment is not a trivial part of the mobile application development. The deployment strategy you design will have a big impact on the success of your project. I hope this post helps you achieving that success. Stay tuned!