I am working at a client site where there is a proxy server (HTTP) in place. If I do a hard reset of the emulator it forgets network connection settings for the emulator and settings in the hosted Windows Mobile OS. If I 'save state and exit' it will lose all of these settings. I need to do hard resets regularly which means that I lose this information and spend a lot of time setting:
The emulators associated network card
DNS servers for network card in the WM OS.
Proxy servers in connection settings of WM OS.
How can I make my life easier? Can I save this as defaults in the emulator, or create an installer easily?
There is a way you can programmatically provision your devices. If you're using managed code, you can use Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Configuration.dll to do most of the work for you. If you're using unmanaged code, you have to use DMProcessConfigXML native function.
There's more details in this blog post by Andrew Arnott.
The problem with these devices is everything is stored in the RAM and ROM. So you need a second alternate device storage for these settings, just like a real device. So that when a real device, or your device is reset, it has a statically stored configuration file outside of the RAM that can be loaded on start up. The alternative is to do soft-resets if possible.
Related
I found Network Sharing on Win8 mobile. (nokia Lumia)...I am trying to write similar application for Win8. But could not find any support on windows website. On Nokia website also, all I could find is how to turn on, but nothing else.
So, I have a lot of questions in my mind:
Is Network sharing is even supported by Windows or is it Nokia that has their own app to do this?
How this network sharing works? Are we tethering WLAN or something else?
Is it possible to write a similar app with the existing Win8 mobile APIs provided?
Does it use DNSMasq? ( I am assuming it is)
Is there any possible way to find the installed apps and the app structures in Win8 phone, like we have in android phones.
Network sharing is fully implemented by WP8 OS but it is under tight control from your cellular operator. You need to pay extra to enable "tethering" (here in USA). The cellular connection (4G, LTE) is then shared and your phone turns into Wi-Fi access point for other devices. When I try to enable network sharing on my HTC 8X (I am not paying for tethering), the screen flics with Wi-Fi details - tells me Wi-Fi broadcast name, password and number of guests connected - and then one second later I get a dialog from T-Mobile to go online and add tethering to my phone plan.
See above.
No, I don't think it is possible. As an app you don't have any control over network configuration.
I'd assume it provides NAT, DHCP and DNS forwarding. I don't think it uses DNSMasq code directly though. :-)
For privacy reasons you can't get a list of installed apps. Only when you are writing apps for enterprises (that don't go through Microsoft Store), you can list other apps signed with the same enterprise key. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/jj207245.aspx.
I need to use a monitor as a "private" device for my special application, I want to use it as a flashlight of a sort and draw special patterns on it in full screen. I don't want this monitor to be recognized by OS (Windows 7) as a usual monitor. I.e. user should not be able to move mouse to that monitor, or change its resolution, or run screensaver on it or whatever. But I want to be able to interact with it from my application. Monitor is plugged using an HDMI cable to a video card (most probably nVidia).
What is the simplest way to do this? All solutions are appreciated, including purchasing additional adapters or simple video cards, or any other special devices. The only solution I could imagine for now is to plug the monitor to another computer, run a daemon on that computer, connect it to my computer via ethernet or whatever, communicate with that daemon from my computer. It is pretty ugly and require additional computer. But I need to solve this problem.
To do this, detach the monitor from the desktop. Detaching a monitor from the desktop prevents Windows from using it for normal UI.
Sample code for attaching and detaching monitors is in this KB article. Once you've done that, you can use the monitor as an independent display.
Building upon your own idea of using an external PC, and Mark's comment on using a VM as this "external" device:
You could buy an external USB-to-VGA video adapter like one of these, approx. USD40:
http://www.newegg.com/USB-Display-Adapters/SubCategory/ID-3046
Almost every VM software supports some kind of USB passthrough. VirtualBox is a great example.
Only the VM sees the USB device, the host ignores it completely.
So the steps would be:
Buy said USB-to-VGA adapter.
Configure slim a virtual machine and cook up a little utility to receive the images to show on he screen by network.
Configure VirtualBox to connect the USB-to-VGA adapter directly to the virtual machine.
Here is another simple solution to monitor you application.
Your app should provide an API monitor service, served as HTTP on any port you want (for example http://{userip}:{port}/{appname}/monitor).
Your app monitors itself, keeping monitoring data in memory, in a local file or a database, hidden from the user. The monitor API serves this data to any device you want that has a browser (tablet, phone, netbook, android mini-PC, low cost linux device, any PC or any OS... from the internet, your LAN or direct connection to the PC hosting the app).
Pros:
Data to monitor is collected (and served) within your app : only one executable
Display can be done remotely : from anywhere !
Access security easily done using standard HTTP authentication mecanisms
You can monitor several applications (ie several monitoring URLs)
You are free to use any browser to monitor (even a local window browser on the same PC for testing purposes)
Monitor from any hardware and OS you want
Simple and flexible !
Cons:
There is few, but tell me...
Choosing this solution depends on what kind of data you need to monitor (text, images, video...), and also on what is the refresh rate you expect depending on your system network configuration.
Hope it helps :)
I have an Arduino application talking over USB to an application on Windows 8 using the MAVLINK protocol. The connection appears as COM3.
Is there a Windows application that can spy on this connection and display the traffic going in both directions? Raw bytes are fine, I don't need the protocol decoded.
You could log serial port activity using Portmon. (Edit: You need to first connect to the local computer via the Computer menu, and you must start capture on the port before a program opens it.)
You may not want to log USB traffic. Such a log would include a lot of extra information relating to the USB to serial adapter which is providing COM3. Portmon would only give you the bytes transferred over COM3, and the Mavlink protocol is entirely contained within that data stream. If you're sure you want to log all USB traffic to and from that device, then I recommend SnoopyPro. In Windows 7, you need to run it as administrator.
If you can use Windows XP in your environment, USB sniff should work for you. If you need something more powerful (and are willing to pay a fee for it) then USBLyzer might be a viable option.
The answer is SnoopyPro, and you can download it at:
SnoopyPro Sourceforge
This tool allows you to get USB information and also USB communication data. I used it in the past to know how a USB device worked in order to do its driver on Linux. I used this tool as a sniffer.
Basically, SnoopyPro allows you to intercept, display, record and analyze the USB protocol and all transferred data between any USB device connected to your PC and applications. It can be successfully used in application development, USB device driver or hardware development and offers the powerful platform for effective coding, testing and optimization.
Whenever I disconnect my Windows Phone from PC (connected through USB) and if my application is running, my application hangs for sometime and then application crashes.
Does anyone experienced same behavior? I guess switching for PC connection to Wi-Fi/GPRS is causing the issue.
the windows Phone Requires that you Safely Remove hardware first, after a few times when i started Development on the windows phone i did the same and Ended up getting a new Phone. So plainly put, try to Safely Remove and Make sure it is installing the app to the Device.
Meaning if you Remove the phone, the App is still able to be ran just like a normal downloaded App form the Market place.
if you want more in depth information, i would suggest Reading the WP7 Everything Programming ebook lol
its filled with good information, and Definitely Helped me along my road to Love DEV for WP7.
As gamernb says, if you disconnect the USB from a properly tethered Windows Phone (i.e. connected to Zune, or using the WPConnect utility), the phone's network connection will be reset and your app's connections will be terminated. The phone will then start trying to connect using WiFi or cellular data (if they are on), but this can take quite a while.
You will have to handle this network disconnection in your app - I've found that pulling the USB cable in this way is a good ad-hoc test for WP7 apps: do an action which you know will use the network connection. Then watch if the app crashes, or handles this gracefully.
Actually you aren't guaranteed to always use the PC data connection: if you make sure that the computer has no data connection (i.e. pull the Ethernet cable, turn off WiFi etc ), the WP7 app can then use cellular data or WiFi on the phone instead.
Alas-
you could set perimeters in your application to Check what the connection type is, then Make changes accordingly.
You May have a slight freeze, but that's better then a crash....mainly when the phone switches from PC to WWAN, their would be a slight Pause.
use the Reachability Class and NSLog to Figure out whats going on exactly.
I really hope that helps!
We develop a custom Windows CE-based device. To connect this to the PC via ActiveSync / Mobile Device Center, we have to set up entries so that the WCE USB Serial Host (wceusbsh.sys) recognises our Vendor ID (Vid) and Product ID (Pid).
To do this, to date, we have distributed a modified version of wceusbsh.inf and wceusbsh.sys: when the user first connects the device then ActiveSync basically says it does not recognise the device, and the user is asked to identify a driver for it. If they now point at the location where they've stored our wceusbsh.* files then all is well. However this is pretty clunky.
What we really want is a slick way to do this, preferably by running an installer which just gets everything ready, so that as soon as the device is plugged in it is recognised by wceusbsh.sys.
Any clues how to do this? There seem to be a ton of registry entries which relate to WCEUSBSH, and it's not clear how these are set: just "installing" the .INF file doesn't seem to allow for setting them all, so it does look like ActiveSync reads the .INF file and then adds some more information before appending the new info to the Registry.
Thanks
Well, in case anyone else comes looking for an answer to this, we managed to do it via this link from MSDN WinUSB (Windows Driver Kit). We now have a driver install program which sets up USB / Mobile Device Center so that when you plug in the CE device it is recognised correctly.