Today I needed to quickly do some screen mock ups for a customer.   Rather than lay out yet another mobile form with labels down the left (right aligned and prettied up) and text labels on the left (left aligned and prettied up),  I thought I would create myself some templates.

I’ve now got a set of all the most common ones I need -

Its really easy to-do and saves you a pile of time.

Here’s an example of my base form -

All you need todo in Visual Studio from the File menu is select Export Template, then follow the wizard through.

You can then tidy up the resultant templates by looking in

%userprofile%\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\My Exported Templates

A nice little tip, I found is that when you create a new instance of your template if you put the string

$safeitemname$

In the template file, it will substitute your class name in where you need it, great for setting window titles etc.

Finally zip up the contents of your template and copy to

%userprofile%\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual C#

You can of course do the same for VB.net etc.

My only final tip, is to make sure you get your object (form etc.) right before you export it,  its a pain to edit templates.   Not impossible just a flaff.

I know I’ve been banging on about this a fair bit.    But we are at T Minus 14 days till I attempt the worlds first Virtual Earth Powered Balloon Race, well actually its Helium powered but you get the idea.

If you want to be part of this,  go buy a ticket at www.racingballoon.com

Ok,  so here’s the scoop.

I’ve been playing around with adding location EXIF tags to a photo taken on a Windows Mobile device.  I’ve reached the conclusion that reading tags is not that difficult but writing them can be a pain in the bottom.

So, I’m thinking, about using a web-service to post pictures from the mobile device along with the location the picture was taken and letting the full framework add the required EXIF tags and save it to the photo sharing/blog of your choice.

So its early days (as I’m a newbie to this),  but here's the bit of full framework code that lists the EXIF tags and the bit commented out at the bottom shows how to add a simple tag.

            Image theImage = new Bitmap(@"someimage.jpg");

            // Get the PropertyItems property from image.
            PropertyItem[] propItems = theImage.PropertyItems;

            foreach (PropertyItem i in propItems)
            {
                if (i.Type == 2 ) // strings at the moment
                {
                    Debug.WriteLine(i.Id + " " + i.Type + " " + ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetString(i.Value));
                    Debug.WriteLine("");
                }
                else
                {
                    Debug.WriteLine(i.Id + " " + i.Type + " " + i.Value.Length);

                }

            }
            
            // adding a new tag
            // PropertyItem p = new PropertyItem();

            // theImage.SetPropertyItem();
            

Anyway,  we’ll see how this progresses.

Another just wow moment. (watch from about the halfway point)

http://www.gottabemobile.com/GBM+Shortcut+Live+Labs+Seadragon+On+Surface.aspx

This looks cool (and new),   NavReady - The next generation of portable navigation devices.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/embedded/products/navready/default.mspx

So here’s the problem.    Today’s sudden emergency, we found a bug with a mobile application.    The bug was traced quickly to a small typo in a web-service.    I was in my office miles away from the client,  yes I had sloooow VPN access but I needed to get a fix quickly deployed to all nodes on a three machine load balanced IIS farm.

So this is what I did.

In Visual Studio, I published my website to a local folder on my hard disk.    I then removed the web.config as  didn’t need the pressure of having to rebuild the configuration for all environments.

I then file copied this up to a test machine, got the customer to test and confirm that I’d fixed the problem.

Next step,  was to use a batch file (and this is the nugget) to restart each IIS server in turn  (using iisreset) and copy the files from test to production across each server.

Having a batch file to achieve this stopped me having to type lots of commands under pressure.   Common sense stuff I know, but this really saved my bacon today.

Total time for fix,  around 15 minutes.     The world keeps turning

Got a spare £1600 for a PDA?

Go buy yourselves one of these babies.   All my mobile software looks great on these as its got twice the clock speed of most normal high end rugged devices (i.e 800 Mhz)

These are military grade machines that I’m sure could take a bullet or two.   The picture doesn’t really do it justice  they are chunky and very well made.  The VGA screen,camera and barcode reader are all just superb.  Not forgetting its routes in high end field survey,  so it has a top of the line inbuilt GPS.

Lets just say £1600 one more time…  

Want one

OMG!   This is just out of this world.

http://deepzoom.soulclients.com/VE/

This is very cool.    Want a map that you can quickly display on a mobile application?

Now I believe to the letter of the law you need a Mappoint.Net licence to use this legally.   But that aside,  lets just look at the tech.  for displaying a map from Virtual Earth as a flat image that can be rendered easily on a mobile application.

Like -

I kind of reverse engineered the URL from -

http://api.tiles.virtualearth.net/api/GetMap.ashx?b=r,device.mobile&op=0,,52.1439066666667,0.0902583333333333&c=52.1439066666667,0.0902583333333333&w=175&h=175&z=14

If you look at the URL,  you can see that I have a long/lat for both the centre of the map and a pushpin.

Very easy to add to any mobile line of business application.   Just check with your licensing people first before using in anything production.  

A few people have commented about my GPSPhone application,  a few people are struggling to install it.

The GPS Phone application is here

http://www.binaryrefinery.com/main/www.binaryrefinery.com/main/content/binary/gpsphone.cab

You need the SQL Compact runtime to get the application, which you can download from

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=38ed2670-a70a-43b3-87f3-7ab67b56cbf2&displaylang=en

Trust me, its worth the pain

No sooner had I blogged about my cross-platform I-Ching test application running under Safari.    Its up on www.apple.com.    You’d think those Apple people would be busy at the moment.    Anyway,  thank you very much.

Link here - http://www.apple.com/webapps/entertainment/mobileichingreadings.html

This is fairly nice.  I didn’t realise there was a standard for geotagging any website.    As location plays more and more an important role in the world of the mobile web,  I figured now was a good time to start adding a bit of location information to my site.

It works by adding some meta tags to the head of your web-pages,  i.e

<meta name="geo.region" content="GB-CAM" />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Cambridge" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="52.26542;0.18947" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="52.26542, 0.18947" />

I found a really quick way of generating the tags using this site -

http://www.geo-tag.de/generator/en.html

Next mission to work out which search engine can read the tags.