Met Tim Dawson (MVP) of DiVElements the other day.

Wow,  what cool controls he makes...

http://www.divelements.co.uk/net/controls/

(image from Yahoo)

Hat tip to John Goldsmith, VISIO MVP and all round nice guy.   For this great information.

I often need to mock up Mobile (and if forced :-) ) desktop user interface layouts.     

Normally I do this straight in visual studio.    However  I may now move to Visio to achieve  this thanks to these stencil templates

http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/wireframes/

I wonder, if Yahoo will ever release these as WPF controls :-) ?

I love geocaching,    go look at http://www.geocaching.com/ for a better description, than I could ever give.

So my idea today is lets put QR codes/Windows Live Barcodes on all cache's.    Find the cache,  scan the barcode with your camera phone and that will take you automatically to the cache find page.    You dig me brothers and sisters?

Hi all,  really proud to announce that Microsoft have decided they like what I'm doing and have made me an MVP again.   I love doing line of business mobile apps  and clearly from the feedback I get, you like hearing about it.

Amazing what one guy and a server sitting on a fridge can achieve.

Thank you all.

Just watch this.    Envy.   Windows Mobile needs this.

Google Android - Zebra Crossing

Today via proxy my slide deck was presented at the launch of Dynamics AX and Dynamics NAV 2009 launch at Microsoft TVP.

I can't help but enthuse about what it will mean to us developers now that via web-service we can invoke elements of NAV/AX directly from an external application.

This changes the landscape considerably for me as a line of business developer, as I can now concentrate on application atheistic's and functionality rather than duplicating logic for how the underlying ERP system works.

Smart mobility,  just got a lot smarter...

Thanks to Phil Newman, Steve Farr and Gary Turner of Microsoft for helping me out.

Oh yes, and as for the post title,  I thought I'd just make you all smile...

As the complexity of our mobile line of business applications increases,   it takes longer and longer to compile our applications.

Now I knew that Microsoft has this great new build tool called MSBuild inside Visual Studio 2008,  but I didn't know much about it.

Bottom line you can compile .Net applications from the command line.   Or more importantly have your application builds happening on another machine.

Documentation here -http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171452.aspx

This is what I have started doing.

Launch the Visual Studio 2008 Command prompt

Navigate to the folder where your project file is.

type msbuild  YOURPROJ.CSPROJ

and there you go,   it compiles your project...

I see that Chris Tacke is doing this too  http://blog.opennetcf.org/ctacke/SyndicationService.asmx/GetAtom

Just check out http://www.gumstix.com/

So I'm thinking is this the new future,  prefix your mobile Iwith M,   aka http://m.lastminute.com,     is this the new groove for identifying mobile websites?

Surely .mobi is too many keystokes to type what's your view?   Should I go m.binaryrefinery.com ( or far shorter url)

As you know,  I've been having a spot of bother on a .Net Compact Framework 2.0 application with the numeric up-down control.   See - here

So,   rather than deploying .Net Compact 3.5 runtimes to lots of devices which wasn't really an option,   I decided to build my own spinner control  that can cope with numbers greater than 32767.

Solutions for this already exist in libraries like www.opennetcf.org  but I needed to not add any more overhead to my application.

So,  I came up with a very simple user control to-do the job for me.

This is what I came up with.   Note my elevator buttons that switch on and off depending of whether you are at the top or bottom of the range.

Quite simply its a textbox and couple of pictures placed on a user control.    However the interesting part of this control is how to make it spin...   When the user holds their finger or stylus on one of the buttons it increments/decrements the count until the control is released.

This is achieved of course with the mousedown and mouseup events and a background thread.   If we look at the down arrow I have the following code.

       private void pbdown_MouseDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
       {
           directionup = false;
           increment();
       }

        private void pbdown_MouseUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
       {
           running = false;
       }

The magic happens in the increment method which starts a background thread

private void increment()
        {
            ThreadStart threadstart = new ThreadStart(run);
            incthrd = new Thread(threadstart);
            incthrd.Start();
        }

        private void run()
        {
            running = true;
            while (running)
            {
                if (!Valid) return;
                if (directionup)
                {
                    Value++;
                }
                else
                {
                    Value--;
                }
                if (running) Thread.Sleep(100);   // speed of the spin
            }
        }

Finally a property is used (Value)   to set using a control invoke the correct contents of the textbox.

As follows -

public decimal Value
       {
           get
           {
               return ourvalue;
           }
           set
           {

               decimal oldvalue = ourvalue;
               ourvalue = value;
               ourvalue = Math.Max(ourvalue, Minimum);
               ourvalue = Math.Min(ourvalue, Maximum);
               textBox1.Invoke(new EventHandler(updatetext));
               }

           }

When the textbox value is changed,  I fire an event so the form with the control on it gets an event that something has happened.

public void updatetext(object o, EventArgs e)
       {
           this.textBox1.Text = ourvalue.ToString("0");
           textboxmirror = this.textBox1.Text;
           this.textBox1.SelectAll();
           pbup.Visible = ourvalue != Maximum  & enabled & visible;
           pbdown.Visible = ourvalue != Minimum  & enabled & visible;

           if (ValueChanged != null) ValueChanged(this, ourvalue);  // Fire an event

       }

So  our problems with the numeric-up-down control resolved.    The other bonus is that I now can regulate the speed of the spinner when we hold the mouse down.   Speeding it up faster than the .Net Compact Frameworks inbuilt control is perceived by the user as a performance improvement (bonus).    

So, its started I've started work on a Windows Mobile based radio controlled auto-pilot.

My application reads a list of route instructions (from an XML file), including taking pictures,  video and returning back to the launch position.

Early days yet but I have a basic framework built and its responding nicely to input from the GPS intermediate driver.   Anyone want a copy of this work in progress source, please let me know.

I have a customer application that uses a .Net Compact Framework 2.0   application.    We've just uncovered a little issue that we know is fixed in the .Net Compact Framework 3.5

If you place a NumericUpDown Control on a form, i.e

The Maximum value you can set it too, is 32767. 

If you go any higher,  you end up with a 0 in your NumericUpDown control.

I just found this out the hard way...

Oh, Oh let me at it...

Drone autonomous aircraft, Windows Mobile powered

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844%3ABlogPost%3A729

I want in. :-)