The great site geonames.org offers some webservices. One of these is called timezone and will give you the timezone information for a given geographic Latitude and Longitude. With a GPS enabled Windows Mobile device you can so query the webservice and get timezone informations for the current location.

Unfortunately the webservice does not offer WSDL and so you have to write your own wrapper class. I wrote a small class that does the HttpWebRequest and decodes the xml reponse for easy use in your application.

Continue reading ‘Using ws.geonames.org timezone webservice without WSDL’ »

If you want to lockdown a user of a Windows Mobile device to not send/receive SMS messages or eMails, you can use a blacklist. First enable Disallow policy on the device and then list all apps you dont like the user to run.

REGEDIT4

;Enable blacklist of applications that should not run
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security\Policies\Shell]
"DisallowRun"=dword:1

;Add entries to blacklist of applications that should not run
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\DisallowRun]
"1"="tmail.exe"
"2"="sms.dll"
"3"="poutlook.exe"
;add more here as "3", "4", "5", etc.

tmail.exe, sms.dll and poutlook.exe are responsible for message handling on the device. If you disallow them, the user cannot start them anymore.

CodeProjectFeeder

Update 3. sept. 2011:
Fixed a bug according to WeBiscuit’s post at the CodeProject Technical Blog Article. See download of version 1.11.

In the beginning, everything was done manually.

After the third time I had to edit feed-rss2.php of wordpress to fulfill CodeProjects Technical Blogs requirements I now wrote my first (and last?) wordpress plugin.

As you may know, CodeProject allows you to publish articles through your current blog. See here for the FAQ.

As I am using wordpress, I started some time ago to submit blog entries into CodeProject. I had to find out myself, where to change which file.

Limit published articles

To limit the range of blog entries that are published at CodeProject Technical Blogs I use a ‘hidden’ feature and created a category named ‘CodeProject’ in my WordPress blog. On my Technical Blogs site in CodeProject I then used http://www.hjgode.de/wp/category/codeproject/feed/ for the feed input. Now only the articles marked with WordPress category ‘codepoject’ are feed to CodeProject.

Manually changes required in WordPress for CodeProject Technical Blogs

In feed-rss2.php I always had to add a <category>CodeProject</category> line below <channel>. Further I had to change the footer.php of the wordpress theme Win7blog that I use. There I added a rel=”tag” line as recommended by CodeProject.

The pain of doing it again and again

Now, the first manual change has to be done everytime you update your wordpress release. I had to to this at least three times before I start now with a plugin to I avoid changing the file again manually.

The idea of a WordPress plugin

I never wrote a WordPress plugin before, but I did some html, php and mysql coding before (ie the calendar on www.fewo-britta.de or the static pages at www.derbiedermann.de, which are generated from a db). But the learning curve was hard and it took me several hours to get the plugin working. I started with the plugin described at DevLounge in there “How to write a WordPress plugin” series. The article was the only one I could find that describes wordpress plugin development from scratch with a working example.

As I had problems adopting the code to my needs, especially the AdminPage, I had to rewrite the code a little bit.

Continue reading ‘WordPress Plugin to feed CodeProject Technical Blogs’ »

Unfortunately, there is no in depth information about the Pocket or Mobile Internet Explorer (PIE) comaptibility. So I can only give some suggestions. But I hope this informations will help you getting started and don’t run into trouble.First, although M$ states, that PIE is compatible to Internet Explorer 4.1, 5.0, 5.5 or 6.0, depending on the OS level you run on a windows ce based device, this is only a general statement:

Pocket Internet Explorer has been updated to support the following:

HTML 4.01
Extensible HTML (XHTML)
Cascading style sheets
Microsoft Jscript® version 5.5
Enhanced scripting and Document Object Model support
Wireless Markup Language (WML) 2.0 (XHTML + WML 1.x)
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) in IPv4/IPv6 mixed-mode environments
New extensible imaging library

From TechEd powerpoint

HTML 3.2 Compliant
JavaScript 1.1 compliant
XML Object Model
SSL
Active X support (no download!)
=============================
HTML 3.2-based object model
   Not the IE4 OM
Core script support:
   Scripting against FORM elements
   Scripting against the XML OM<
Not supported:
   Dynamic frameset creation
   Dynamic script generation
   Window.open

If you try some more special functions of the desktop IE versions, you will find the limits very fast. In example, the OnKey() event is not supported in any of the actual CE OS versions (<=6). XML Dataislands support is very limitted.

Continue reading ‘The Pocket or Mobile Internet Explorer’ »