digWin: winmob - voted

Inking on your Windows Mobile Device

While at MEDC I had the chance to present a new addition to the Windows Mobile APIs: WISP Lite

WISP stands for Windows Ink Service Platform and it is the technology for ink recoginition used in other platforms like Tablet PC. In the Windows Mobile 6 SDK Help, it is referred to as Windows Mobile Ink. Even though WISP Lit is just a subset

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On the Left Hand: How Feature Prioritization Happens

An old blog entry continues to get requests for us to allow users to move their scroll bars to the left side of the screen. I’ve forwarded the suggestions on to the appropriate people, but, since I’m not on that team, I don’t actually know what will happen with the feature. That said, I figured this would be a good example to use in

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All About "Application Locked"

I have been working on this post slowly for several days, but Reed and Steve are seriously kicking my butt on posting solid developer-focused technical security content. Read their blog - they covered a lot of this material

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Ask the Hacker Curmudgeon: How can I minimize the chance of getting a useful answer to my question?

Protect your question with an impenetrable cloak of vagueness.

1) Choose a subject line that conveys no information. This means that the subject matter expert needs to choose between spending more time on your message to figure out what it's about, or just moving on to other questions that can be triaged faster.

2) Bury your

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What do you mean by "locked"?

There are a few different things that people might mean when they say their phone is "locked". I wanted to provide this post to help define the different types of lock.

SIM Locked

This typically means that the phone will only work on the network of one specific operator. This is handled by the GSM network and

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Free Collection of Windows Mobile Security White Papers

Our Device Management and Security (DMSec) team recently produced a series of security booklets. These were very well recieved at the MEDC 2007 event last week. So I'd like to point out that these are also available online. Among the topics you will find:

Security Risks in the Mobile Enterprise
The Windows Mobile Security

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MS Pranks

Michael Howe, the all powerful Test Lead in Windows Mobile just got back from paternity leave to find a few small gifts in his office...

Now you know where all those recycled monitors go... :)

Have a great weekend

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Introducing....the oFone!

Here's the spoof video that was shown at MIX '07 and MEDC last week.

Behind the humor, there's a serious message - adapt your app! Windows Mobile devices are coming in all shapes and sizes. If you're hard-coding things like screen sizes and coordinates, or assuming any particular orientation or device form factor in your

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Dogfood Doesn't Always Taste Good

A while back someone asked which phones the Windows Mobile team uses. While I will end up answering that question, in typical form, I’m going to be really verbose about it.

In Windows Mobile, we’re very strong proponents of what we call, “Eating our own dogfood.” What this means is that we use the code we’re

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Softkeys and you!

Hi, my name is Patrick Derks and I work as a developer in the Windows Mobile Shell. I’ve owned the softkey code in Windows Mobile for a few months now and I keep getting questions about how to do basic stuff with the softkeys. For example, I had a developer just the other day ask how they could change the label of a softkey.

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New Windows Mobile video on Channel9

I recently sat down with Rory Blyth from Channel9 to talk about some of the new features in Windows Mobile 6 and cool developer features we're working on. Click here to watch the video (approx 28 minutes):

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Congratulations! It's a. . . WiMo!

WiMo (The Windows Mobile Robot) has a couple of cousins! Some students and faculty over at the Auto ID lab at MIT have built a few WiMos to experiment in their RFID research. For more information on their project, you can check out their project web page at http://autoid.mit.edu/cs. In

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Microsoft Team Spirit

As Microsoft employees, we take great pride in our software products and commitment to customers. Microsoft decided a long time ago that we would take a holistic approach and make sure that all our products talk to each other. The integration you see between Windows, Office, Windows Mobile, SQL Server, Visual Studio etc is not an accident. It is

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Sync Up at MEDC 2007

The Windows Mobile Sync & Desktop Platform team is planning a "mini track" at this year's MEDC to focus on data synchronization and desktop connectivity. This session will be a great opportunity for you to discuss/debug your current use of sync technologies with the

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A 6 By Any Other Name…

Marketers and developers. Are we really even the same species? The degree to which I don’t understand my coworkers over in marketing can be aptly summed up in 4 words: “Windows Mobile 6 Professional.” The product’s great, but the name? I would probably have called it something else.

Not that I’m suggesting that

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Windows Mobile 6 Storage Card Encryption FAQ

My colleague Jason Langridge wrote a post about the

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Getting Started with MAPI

(update 3/22/2007 1:59pm: see comments for .NetCF equivalent)

I’m Jay Ongg, and I’m a developer for Mobile Devices at Microsoft. I’ve been in this division for a little over four years, and as part of my job, I work with OEMs and ISVs. I’m here to write

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Why I Work In Windows Mobile

My manager asked me to write something to convince other Microsoft employees to come work in our division. Originally this was going to be posted internally somewhere and linked from our job descriptions. But I realized that some of this might be interesting to you folks too. I’m going to explain why I get out of bed every day and come

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What would you like to see in future phone APIs

We are in the phone app team. The Phone app is the app that is used to make and manage voice calls.We are trying to understand how the developers use the phone app or would like to use the phone as a platform. We would like you to answer the following questions.1. What are the things you wanted to

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Last minute $500 discount for MEDC 2007

If you haven't registered for the MEDC 2007 conference yet, here's a chance to still get in for a hugely discounted price of $800. MEDC is the biggest official developer conference for Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded developers, and is co-hosted with MIX07 this year. For details

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Where is everyone? - MEDC consumes Windows Mobile team!

Hopefully everyone was able to take advantage of that sweet MEDC registration discount Mel posted last week. I noticed that no-one had posted on the blog for a week.

So where is everyone?

The answer for a lot of people is "heads down preparing for MEDC". For example, Mel is busy working on keynote demos - so

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Why did we remove Bluetooth DUN?

I’m Greg Scott and I work as a developer on a team that provides core networking technologies on Windows Mobile. There has been some [negative] feedback from the community about Bluetooth dial-up networking (DUN) being removed in WM5 AKU3. I’ll do my best to explain that.

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Windows Mobile Competition at NTCC 2007

A while back a few of us had a chance to help out in a Dell and Microsoft sponsored programming competition at NTCC 2007.

NTCC is a conference held by SHPE (Society of Hispanic and Professional Engineers). We had a blast and a chance to share some of the "Windows Mobile" love.

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Practical Use of MAPI

Hi everyone, I’m Jay Ongg, ready to do more with MAPI. Last time, I wrote a function that displays the names of all the message accounts on your device. In this article, I’ll go a little bit further.

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Security Configuration Manager Powertoy = an Orcas Feature

A few months ago I wrote a blog post showing the Security Configuration Manager Powertoy. http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2006/06/22/643027.aspx. This powertoy allows you to see standard security configurations, provision your device, see the security

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Hi! My name is WiMonet, I'm ready to paint.

MEDC 2007 is just around the corner, and I can't

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