Develop Bugs

App idea, need help starting. :)

Since there isn't a SAPI that's accessible for windows mobile developers, I was disappointed. I just got a Samsung Omnia and I'm quite enthralled by it. I want to write an application that does speech recognition and text to speech.
eSpeak is a program easily ported. It's been done and comes with a how-to guide for compiling for windows mobile 6.x. As far as text to speech goes, then, I'm not too worried (it will be fun developing a voice.)
I got pocketsphinx to compile. The project settings says it was compiled for an x86 machine. Do I have to compile it for the ARM architecture, or do I just need to compile the final application for the ARM architecture, with the pocketsphinx dll somehow baked into the end result?
Also, I was wondering if anyone could point me to a beginner level tutorial for developing applications on windows mobile. I'm brand spanking new to developing on mobile devices, and while the language specific stuff is old hat, there's lots of transitional stuff I need to learn. Any links are appreciated. I'd like to not brick my Omnia by doing something silly, so I'll be developing strictly on my desktop until I'm satisfied with the safety of whatever it is I'm developing.
Thanks, awesome community here!

Hey there JR. As far as WinMo development, here's a list of the basic tools you need:
1. Visual Studio 2008 Professional SP1 + patches (or VS 2010 which is in beta now)
2. Windows Mobile 6 Professional and Standard Software Development Kits Refresh (device and cellular emulators, some samples, download from msdn.microsoft.com)
3. Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Tool Kit (6.5 emulator images, gestures API etc - also at msdn.microsoft.com)
Assuming you will be writing managed code, the most widely used language is C#.
As far as books, unfortunately WInMo is not getting much love these days (hopefully this will change with WinMo 7) so there's little new but the best book out there IMO is "Microsoft Mobile Development Handbook" by Andy Wigley (2007).
The good news is that there's a plethora of on-line material, easily accessible from the aggregate Search screen in Visual Studio. Sites like codeguru.com, social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsmobiledev, www.c-sharpcorner.com, www.codeproject.com, 4guysfromrolla.com etc are your best friends!
I hope this gets you started! Best of luck with the project.

JRowe47 said:
Since there isn't a SAPI that's accessible for windows mobile developers, I was disappointed. I just got a Samsung Omnia and I'm quite enthralled by it. I want to write an application that does speech recognition and text to speech.
eSpeak is a program easily ported. It's been done and comes with a how-to guide for compiling for windows mobile 6.x. As far as text to speech goes, then, I'm not too worried (it will be fun developing a voice.)
I got pocketsphinx to compile. The project settings says it was compiled for an x86 machine. Do I have to compile it for the ARM architecture, or do I just need to compile the final application for the ARM architecture, with the pocketsphinx dll somehow baked into the end result?
Also, I was wondering if anyone could point me to a beginner level tutorial for developing applications on windows mobile. I'm brand spanking new to developing on mobile devices, and while the language specific stuff is old hat, there's lots of transitional stuff I need to learn. Any links are appreciated. I'd like to not brick my Omnia by doing something silly, so I'll be developing strictly on my desktop until I'm satisfied with the safety of whatever it is I'm developing.
Thanks, awesome community here!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Writing in C#.NET Compact -- you have no worries for 'safety', unless you literally do a File.Delete("/Windows/blah");, you should be okay ;P
But yes, It is based off of the big .NET Framework. So if you can do .NET, you can do .NETCF.

acidhax said:
if you can do .NET, you can do .NETCF.
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I don't agree. In .NET you usually do not need to worry about performance, you usually get away just fine by using a simple approach at the cost of a small bit of performance. On .NET CF you certainly need all the performance you can get. Also, the .NET Compact Framework is heavily stripped down and for a lot of tasks you need to find an alternative, innovative solution.

Silverlight 4 Likely as Dev Platform

Given Andy Lees quote about WP7: "It's a very sort of advanced platform that really works across PC, phone, and console," it seems likely he's talking about Silverlight 4, especially given the boost in features that it's getting for version 4. I find this to be a very suitable platform for what they're trying to do. You can't beat multi-platform & RIA support - dev once, run on all. What do you think?

Still very propretiary

chribruu said:
Still very propretiary
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So what? All current phones only support native applications that are created with a proprietary SDK. The big exception is Java which is executed in a VM, but these applications cannot use the full potential of each platform, because they must aim for the lowest common denominator. So without modifications, no native application will run on all platforms.

chribruu said:
Still very propretiary
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It's not any different than the current situation really. How many people write WM code in anything other than Visual Studio?

Basically a different set of GUI libraries on .Net 3.5.
Hope they'll make SL4 available on WM6.5, too. That way it would be a much better platform choice.

You're all right. I replied without really thinking my post trough. :/
The only thing bad with SL (and flash) is if/when they become web "standards".
Just disregard that post
Sorry for the OT.

from the little i have read/seen. it seems like this will prob be the case..

Silverlight will be one of the dev platforms, along with C++ with a XAML UI.

in this video
"Behind the Design of Windows phone 7" on youtube (i could not post the link)
1:25 - 1:29
you can see the ide for wp7.
it looks like blend. that would definitely mean xaml for ui.

pensoffsky said:
in this video
"Behind the Design of Windows phone 7" on youtube (i could not post the link)
1:25 - 1:29
you can see the ide for wp7.
it looks like blend. that would definitely mean xaml for ui.
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Click to collapse
And as I said, C++ with a XAML UI...

XNA C#, no dubt for the games.
It's available for the Zune HD, I guess it will follow on to WP7
But maby not for the UI?? any thoughts?
From XNA.com :
XNA Game Studio 3.1 Zune Extensions, to support Zune HD, adds the following functionality to the product:
The ability to target and develop for the Zune HD media player.
The addition of new Touch APIs to the XNA Framework for use on the Zune HD.
The addition of new Accelerometer APIs to the XNA Framework for use on the Zune HD.
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I don't really believe, that they'll be using an unmanaged language for the application developement itself (other than drivers of course).
I think it would be most likely to be using C#, perhaps more in the way of how most android apps use java, e.g. it's precompiled on deployment.
What I really hope for is that, there is no longer the limitation of 32 mb per process.

Hacking and development

I've been out of the loop a long time as far as programming goes. Whats the best place to start because when I get my Win7 phone later this year i want to be able to build and modify programs for it. As well as modify the OS as well.
Thanks.

For developing apps: http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7/
As for hacking, we'll most likely have to wait for proper devices first...

What programming language is Win7 Mobile being built in?

slight22 said:
What programming language is Win7 Mobile being built in?
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There's silverlight and XNA. Silverlight is being recommended for applications and 2d games while XNA is being recommended for heavier 3d games.
Silverlight isn't bad. It's just c# and xaml. The free tools provided are great. You can get VS2010, XNA Game Studio, and Blend. The advantage to Blend is that it lets you design your silverlight interfaces and animations in a simple GUI instead of having to code it.

Quake III and OpenGL

Hey there!
I'm wondering if OpenGL games, like Quake III, can be ported just like they did for Android with Kwaak3.
Does WinPho7 support OpenGL ES in addition to DX9c?
Best Regards Mr.Sir (Gustaf)

I googled around and it appears that XNA will be the only choice besides silverlight for app/game development. So if you can somehow port an OpenGL came to XNA, then yes.

Mr.Sir said:
Hey there!
I'm wondering if OpenGL games, like Quake III, can be ported just like they did for Android with Kwaak3.
Does WinPho7 support OpenGL ES in addition to DX9c?
Best Regards Mr.Sir (Gustaf)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nope. It's only what you will find in XNA. There are several samples people have posted for porting on xbox 360; same code will work on the phone with VERY little changes.

So, seriously guys, no native support? I mean, when i was working at NDrive they had everything written in C++ with interfaces for each device. I doubt that any sane company will rewrite its software completly just to compete in a niche...
Even in .NET CF you COULD do some PInvokes which kinda allowed you to attempt to run a managed version of OpenGL (.NET sucked and still sucks for serious game development, obviously) which was slow as hell, but at least it was there.
So please, native support!

ei05035 said:
.NET sucked and still sucks for serious game development, obviously) which was slow as hell, but at least it was there.
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That's why it is entitled with XNA

Yup Buddy but its gud because you have to code only one time and then you can able to convert it for using on other platforms..

And by several platforms you say M$ based ones. I mean, most companies (i can give you the example of NDrive as I was there for a while) would rather code in C++ and create interfaces for specific platforms. No native code support kills it. I don't see companies renaming extensions to .cs, enabling unsafe code (pointers, etc) and giving it a good dose of whisfull thinking.
Oh and when I meant that XNA sucked for serious gaming i meant really. AAA games don't rely on that. They rely on GPU manufacters SDKs and on the good ol' DirectX SDK. This is if they don't have some housemade engine (like Crytek) similar to Shiva3D or Unity (but custom tailored).
I mean, seriously. In .NET CF 3.5, give it a go, try to natively rotate an image and resize it without manually processing the bitmap information to do so (and at the expense of CPU usage). I had to rely on DxSprites and OpenGL when I needed.
XNA is, as it was already mentioned, game-wise, a game-loop oriented tool with a few PInvokes to DirectX...

ei05035 said:
And by several platforms you say M$ based ones. I mean, most companies (i can give you the example of NDrive as I was there for a while) would rather code in C++ and create interfaces for specific platforms. No native code support kills it. I don't see companies renaming extensions to .cs, enabling unsafe code (pointers, etc) and giving it a good dose of whisfull thinking.
Oh and when I meant that XNA sucked for serious gaming i meant really. AAA games don't rely on that. They rely on GPU manufacters SDKs and on the good ol' DirectX SDK. This is if they don't have some housemade engine (like Crytek) similar to Shiva3D or Unity (but custom tailored).
I mean, seriously. In .NET CF 3.5, give it a go, try to natively rotate an image and resize it without manually processing the bitmap information to do so (and at the expense of CPU usage). I had to rely on DxSprites and OpenGL when I needed.
XNA is, as it was already mentioned, game-wise, a game-loop oriented tool with a few PInvokes to DirectX...
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Click to collapse
If you are so gung-ho, you could write wrappers in C++, compile the DLL and pinvoke your calls.

tyrannus said:
If you are so gung-ho, you could write wrappers in C++, compile the DLL and pinvoke your calls.
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Exactly! Honestly for me it is the way to go. It's not that i don't like C# or .NET, quite the contrary. I'm just sorry that they lack the portability some projects require. And for me, WP7 not having native code support is a real buzz kill. What do you think?

It does have native code support but you need Microsoft's permission to get the SDK. I'm pretty sure game companies will have it if they want to make use of the GPU as much as possible.

WM 6.5 emulator for WP7 ? Possable ?

Just a discussion came up and made me wonder if this is even possable. This is the place to ask, so here we go.
All WP7 models seem to run at 1ghz or higher, thinking the concept that WM 6.5 runs pretty well on hardware that runs at 400-528mhz range. Would it be possable to have a emulator that runs on the platform so you can run 6.1/6.5 on a WP7 phone ? This would allow you to be able to run some older apps with still having WP7.
I would not expect intense games (maybe a card game ok) to run at full speed or anything but, things like Remote desktop and other base apps might be ok with this.
This type of thing would run on any phone (with 1ghz+ hardware) just depending on if all the hardware is supported.
Or I guess there might be a way to "shut down" 7 and open 6.5 kind of how Android runs on the TP2.
The emulator idea came up because it might be able to run on any model with minor updates vs. a boot up just for one phone.
Just some ideas...even if it is possable.
Thanks for reading and dreaming (well I am still waiting for a Verizon WP7 phone)

No sorry, the emulator runs on the x86 architecture, not on ARM.
Dave

DaveShaw said:
No sorry, the emulator runs on the x86 architecture, not on ARM.
Dave
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Maybe I'm misreading the original question, but it sounds like he is asking if it were possible to have an app that would run old Windows Mobile apps, kind of like Classic on WebOS.

well at present we (3rd party) developers wouldn't be able to make something like this as all the APIs don't actually exist. someone with knowledge of the whole code base of windows phone 7 could probably do it but i doubt we'll see it happen. if there are programs you need on windows phone 7, it is definitely faster to just have it redone. it's really only the UI that needs redoing, if it was written in VB or C#, a lot of the code will still work.