It's been a while since I did any check-ins to the OpenNETCF.IoC framework.  It's not due to lack of interest or lack of thought on my part.  I've just been very, very busy lately.  We've now using the IoC project in a few commercial applications with very good results, so there isn't a whole lot more to add (though I do want to add some sort of lifecycle management capabilities).

In the hope of getting a little more adoption of the framework, I've added an adapter to OpenNETCF.IoC for the Microsoft Patterns and Practices CommonServiceLocator (CSL).  You can use CSL code to extract object instances from the Items collection.  My hope is that this makes it easier for development teams using CSL to integrate OpenNETCF.IoC into their mobile and embedded projects.

If you have any other ideas or feature requests for OpenNETCF.IoC, by all means submit a request or start a discussion on the project site.  And if you're using it, I'm always interested to see how it's working out.

When you hire a consultant you're not simply getting someone to sling code (if that's what you want, hire a contractor).  Sure we do that, but we bring along a lot of experience, and quite often a plethora of code libraries.  We tend to see a wide variety of applications and tend to build up wide repositories of knowledge.  For example we're just putting finishing touches on a C# wrapper for using the Anviz SM2000 fingerprint reader.  It's a low-cost OEM module that seems to perform pretty well.  So if you're building a custom Windows CE (now Windows Embedded Compact to be true to Microsoft's marketing engine) device where you need fingerprint authentication, we could have you enrolling and authenticating fingerprints from a managed application very, very quickly instead of you spending a week or more trying to build up code from a not-so-clear spec document.

Very often we here at OpenNETCF work on projects that are internal to companies that is seen by relatively few people or we do infrastructure work that helps an app succeed, but it isn't the app itself. Sometimes, though, we do get an opportunity to write public, commercial applications.  We've just finished version 1 of Trapster for Windows Mobile, which chould hit the Windows Marketplace this month.  For more info on what Trapster is and how it works visit their website, or read one of their reviews such as that on PocketNow or CNET.

The pieces of note here are that we used the OpenNETCF IoC Framework for dependency injection and the Bing Maps web services for all of the mapping and navigation work.

Today I came back to a project that I hadn't worked on in a few months.  I got latest from source control and tried to build, and the linker complained "Error 1 fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'secchk.lib' AudioControl AudioControl".

Now WTF?  I knew this was working before.  The error remindinded me vaguely of a previous problem I had, so I searched my blog and found this one.  The problem that time was that I was building for PPC03 and the project for some reason had not added secchk.lib to my platform.  THis time, however, I am building for a generic Windows CE device, and for some reason it *is* adding it.  Well CE doesn't have this lib, and I don't want it.  A quick scan through the project settings didn't turn up anything obvious, so I went with the more heavy-handed approach of adding the following to a common header file:

#pragma comment(linker, "/nodefaultlib:secchk.lib")
#pragma comment(linker, "/nodefaultlib:ccrtrtti.lib")

Done and done.  (the second is required because when you add the first and rebuild, the linker will then complain about not finding ccrtrtti.lib). No idea why I get the error (I'd love to know the root cause) but I don't have time to dig around.  Fortunately the #pragma directive overrides whatever project settings you have, which can be handy at times.

I've pushed another ode update for the OpenNETCF IoC Framework into Codeplex.  Highlights in this one are the fact that I've added a WorkItems collection to the WorkItem class, meaning there's now the potential for parent/child relationships.