One more small tip:

to disable the today screen and prohibit a user from starting anything from there, simply change the following registry keys:

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Today]
“Enabled”=dword:00000001

change this to

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Today]
“Enabled”=dword:00000000

But be warned, the today screen will not refresh and so the background will not refresh. If you leave (minimize) an app, the screen may partially not refresh.

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’ »

The following is a nice? sample for an automation task. This batch will be executed every time a device connects to your PC via ActiveSync. You will need the itsutils.

As you can read, the batch (script) first tries to check, if it has already been run on the device. This is done by looking for a file called “\OnConnect.done”. In real, the batch deletes a local file (line 13) “OnConnect.done” and then simply copies the file from the device (line16). If the file is found, this device has been already processed (line 17) and the batch gos on with line 66.

If the file is not found, the batch continues with setting the registry changes. It uses saved REG files and the nice tool pregutl to do it remotely (line 22 to 24). After doing the changes, the device will be queried for different registry keys which will be saved to database.txt for later use. The registry keys platform (line 29) and version (line 30) are available on all devices, but OSBuildInfo (line 59) and system (line 48) are only available on CK3x or 7xx.

So in line 33, we try to find the model string for CK3x devices and in line 39 for CN2 devices. In line 43 and 44 we will use the saved model names to jump over the part, that is only valid for PPC (7xx): dump psminfo.txt into database.txt. The OSBuildInfo registry is only been executed for CK3x models.

Finally we put a OnConnect.done onto the device, so we later know, that it was handled. At the very end, we sync the time of the device with the PC.

Continue reading ‘ActiveSync Scripting’ »