Mark Arteaga

Back in March 2005 I wrote an MSDN article and part of the article dealt with copying files from the device (connected via ActiveSync) to the desktop.  I've seen a few posts in the newsgroups every so often on how this can be accomplished so I decided to create a standalone 'Device Browser' application that you can run from the desktop.

To accomplish I used the Desktop Communication Library available on the OpenNETCF website.

Here is a screen shot and the sample application can be downloaded here.

I've been asked by a client to help them setup Remote Performance Monitoring (RPM) tool available with .NET Compact Framework 2.0.  Although it's pretty easy to setup, information is scattered in a lot of places so the reason for this post.

RPM can be found under %Program Files%\Microsoft.NET\SDK\CompactFramework\v2.0\bin. It is available with NETCF SP1 which can be downloaded here.

Steven Pratschner has details on setting up RPM and some other details not documented anywhere.  He's also written some relevant articles here and here.

Chris Tacke wrote a bootstrap application that will automatically setup the device to be used with RPM.  See here for more info and to download. 

David Kline has written detailed descriptions of all the counters here.

If there is anything I missed let me know.

The promotion we ran last week is now complete.  Here are the winning posts:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=774964&SiteID=1

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1021450&SiteID=1

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=799142&SiteID=1

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1089351&SiteID=1

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=90246&SiteID=1

If you are interested in the course click here for more information.

Was taking a look at a screen rotation (portrait to landscape and back) issue we were having in one of our soon to be released products when using the TabControl/TabPage.Height property and Compact Framework 2.0 and Windows Mobile 5.0.

When the screen orientation changed, the Form.Resize event is raised.  Great, easy enough to adjust some ListViews that are in the TabPage using the following code:

Although you think it would work, it doesn't because the TabPages[0].Height property is the Height before the Screen rotation occurs.

To work around this is easy enough, just use the Form.Height properties.

listView1.Height = listView2.Height = (this.Height - (20 * m_scale)) / 2;

where

• 20 is the height of the tabs
• m_scale is to support hi res devices

Download the sample code here.

UPDATE: Got a comment (was deleted for some reason when I was updating this post) about using docking and anchoring which is true but for some reason was not working properly in our application, don't know why so we resorted to manually calculating sizes.  I updated the sample code which shows the ListViews properly sizing using the Anchor property on rotation. 

With the recent release of Collection 5150: Developing Microsoft® Windows Mobile® 5.0 Applications Using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005, Microsoft Learning and OpenNETCF are running a contest to give way five free access codes to the collection ($190 value).

Here's how it will work:

Starting Monday Jan 8 2007 till Jan 12 (5 days total) we will monitor the following developer forums on the MSDN site:

Smart Devices General
Discussion general Smart device development aspects with Visual Studio 2005 in this forum.

.NET Compact Framework
All issues related to Compact Framework 2.0 and 1.0 runtimes.

Each day I will randomly pick a question asked by a user (make sure your email address is correct) and submit the name to Microsoft Learning. Each winner will then receive an email from Microsoft Learning containing an access code and instructions for registering for the online course.  At the end of the five days I'll post all the winners.

That's it! Now go out there and ask you're questions!