The Secrets to Getting Your Green Business Funded | GreenBiz.com

Hi all, I was reading up on other stuff when I stumbled upon this article. The Title might be a little misleading, but the content is very intersting.

I like the clean cut and practical approach of Bryan Korba of Y street Ventures.
Hope you like it too.

-Yogesh


The Secrets to Getting Your Green Business Funded | GreenBiz.com

Using desktop VPN connectivity with Windows Mobile Emulators.

At my day job, I develop Windows Mobile apps based on Symbol MC70 devices and windows Mobile 5.0.

We use the device’s Barcode scanner extensively for our inventory management. So naturally I started using the Symbol EMDK APIs to do it.

The problem came up when I started developing remotely ( at home) I realized in a hard way, none of the Symbol APIs would instantiate or startup on a device emulator. So I extracted the Barcode APIs to an interface and implemented a mock api for Emulator usage. I load the Mock or the actual APIs based on Device info parameter by calling the

SystemParametersInfo method from [DllImport("coredll.dll")].

This all works great so far. I was excited once I had this going, hoping to do a bulk of my development while I watching Netflix.

So, at home, I fired up my VPN and I started my debugging the Mobile app with my slick Mock implementation of the Barcode reader. That’s when I realized desktop pass through cannot use the VPN connectivity to talk to my VPN accessible connectivity.

1. Here is what I did. 
   In Visual Studio, used the Device Emulator Manger.
2. Selected the active device I was debugging on.
3. Right click and chose "Cradle”.
4. This brought up my “Windows Mobile Device Center”
5. I chose “Connect without setting up” option.
6. Within the device emulator I used the Internet explorer to navigate to a resource at work. Desktop pass through use the VPN to talk to my resource at work.

Now I can debug my Mobile app and make use of the DB/ WCF Services via my desktop VPN.

Accessing project resource images with a dynamic names.

Let me start off by saying, there are other better ways of accessing this data from the resource file than as listed below. With time and resources available I did this.

Here are my requirements,

1. Need to access images from project resources to bind to controls.

2. The names are dynamic and are DB driven.

So I added all the images I need to the project resource and added all the image names in the DB.

Here is how I was able to access the images from resources by passing in an image name.

I opened the Resources.Designer.cs and added this method.

Now you can access all your images with this line.

Now anywhere in my windows project I can use



to access resource images.

Happy code writing!

Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 Desk top pass through issue.

Recently I upgraded my laptop at work to Windows 7. I like it so far, it has been a good experience so far. Until, I started to debug my Windows Mobile applications via VS 2008 when the device is placed in the cradle and connected via USB.

Windows Mobile devices uses pass through connection to talk to all the external network resources that your laptop or desktop can talk to. This was how it worked by default with Windows XP and active sync.

Active sync on Windows XP pro has this feature turned on by default.

After much research with my bro Google, I was able to figure out it was just one registry setting change that is needed to enable pass through connections. Listed below is the registry setting that is needed.

Under the following registry key path,

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows CE Services]

A) set the dword "AllowLSP" to “00000000”

1) (or create a .reg file(example:LSPvalue.reg) with this text 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows CE Services]
"AllowLSP"=dword:00000000

2) Double click this .reg file to add it to the registry. 

3) Disconnect your device and reconnect it. 

4) Using Internet explorer on the device Try to browse to a external website or internal website. 

You should be able to connect successfully. If not, try to do a warm boot of your device and retry step 4.

Good luck.
-Yogesh

 

Blogger Labels: desktop pass through,AllowLSP, ,Mobile Device Center

PCI and PCIe X1 cards for my T105 Dell server.

Dell T105 servers are neat reliable and cheap. The emphasis is on Cheap, as they are shipped with just enough parts to boot and not even an OS is installed. Very customizable.

I am started using shared servers and do not have much use of this server at home. So I want to use it as a powerful desktop. All I am missing is a good video card and a good sound card.

These T105 servers have a non standard PCIe X8 slots/expansion bays and PCIe X1 and PCI slot.

I went to the neighbourhood Micro center and purchased a pci sound card (Diamond XtreamSound 24Bit PCI)

I brought it home to only realize that the card’s connector cards are facing the opposite way. WFT was my first thought.

Reading fine print shows that the card is of type PCI 2.2, don’t know if this is the reason why the card slots don’t match, but the card is going back tomorrow.

I am buying a Video card and PCI x16 to PCI X1 adaptor with it online at amazon.com after much research, I’m hoping at least it will be compatible. :(

So far its been a frustrating exercise. Check back for further updates.

-Good night!

Blogger Labels: PCIe,Dell,server,card,Micro,Diamond,XtreamSound,Video

Pretty Code in Blogger

I guess Blogger did not realize a bunch of geeky developers will use their blog engine to blogg and paste code. If you are one of us, you would have realized that code pasting support sucks.

My brother Google.com showed me the way. Here is what I use.

http://alexgorbatchev.com/wiki/SyntaxHighlighter:Brushes

Let me know if you want to use this, I will try to post steps on how to use this.

BTW, my previous post had some code snippet from C# in pretty formatted way.

Config file access for Windows Mobile apps

I wanted to post this code of how to use config files within windows mobile apps.




Here is the xml file I use as Config.txt. I also mark this txt file's build action as content and "Copy to output Directory" as "Copy Always"