Living the Evolved Digital Life

Okay, it’s been a couple of months since I evolved my digital life, cut the cord to Premium Digital TV, and got my house in order.  So where am I now?

1.  Lesson Learned:  You cannot run digital video over a wireless router, especially if you have more than 1 wall to go through.  Bite the bullet and pull the ethernet cable if you can.  I was always at 4 bars with the XBox 360, but the router would shutdown every hour or so (sometimes 3 times in a single episode of CSI).  Pulling the cable through the floor was a PITA, but worth it now.

2.  Spend some time and tune your Harmony remote.  It’ll take a lot of time to get it right.  I still have work to do on mine, but each improvement is noticeable, and after a while, you can’t believe you used to use 3 (or 4) remotes.  That said, sometimes it still is a big pain, especially when the kids are sleeping and you switch video inputs, and the sound is cranked up and you can’t get back to turn down the volume down fast enough.  I find myself planning my moves with the remote.

3.  Make sure you have enough disk (at least 1TB) on your Media PC.  I still haven’t hooked up my HD tuner because I haven’t wanted to spend any more money on the setup right now to add enough disk to record HD shows.  I’d also like to have a dedicated Media PC with faster processors that can also host PlayOn, but since we have multiple laptops floating around the house, most of the time the PC is a dedicated Media machine.

4.  2010 will be the year Internet TV really takes off.  My wife says we were probably a year or two early jumping online, and maybe we were.  I’m looking at things like Boxee Box and thinking that was probably what I wanted.

5.  We miss having a channel guide on our TV.  We currently have to switch over to the Media center to get it, and because we get more channels on the cable than what the media center allows us to see, we don’t always know what is on at any given time.  This might be worth a little more research.

6.  I don’t use Hulu near as much as I thought I would.  I just don’t want to go back and watch old shows that often.

7.  I watch a lot more Netflix and am willing to break movies up over multiple nights if I need to.

8.  The kids don’t miss on demand that much.  We have a few videos laying around at home, and a few lined up on Netflix.  That seems to get us through rainy Saturday afternoons.

9.  Maybe I’ve just been busy the last couple of months, but I am watching less TV.  That was a side effect I hoped for.  I’m reading more, and watching better TV when I am watching it.  When there is a little resistance to the inertia of just keeping the TV on all evening, you find other things to do pretty quickly.

10.  I haven’t sprung for the XBox Live Gold Membership since I get everything I want through PlayOn, but as I was watching a movie last night, I definitely noticed that the hop across my HomeServer through PlayOn left dark scenes a little blocky.  For $40 a year, it might be worth it to get the membership.

These things always turn out to be a little more complicated than you think they will.  I feel pretty good about it now, but it’ll be a few months before I really forget the pain of the conversion.

.Net 4.0 and Azure

We were mapping out a release schedule for one of our Azure based applications today, and a major part of the application needs to be completely refactored to eliminate tight coupling between our WPF client and our server application.  This coupling is exacerbated by the inability to properly XML serialize some of our Entity Framework 1.0 objects due to the recursive traversal capabilities of EF 1.0.  We’d like to push the refactor back until EF 4.0 is available, but that brought up the question of when .NET 4.0 would be available on Azure. 

There is no set release data for Azure with .NET 4.0 support at this time. However, Scott Guthrie mentioned on his blog on Dec 17^th that

“We are working with the Azure folks right now to try and get .NET 4 installed on it as soon as possible.  Unfortunately I don't have an exact ETA yet.”

However, the Azure team this week (today since Thursday is their deployment day) did a release to include an ‘OS Version’ attribute for roles so you could specify a particular Azure Build level when deploying. It will default to the most current version if you don’t set it, so it is a way to ensure that if you don’t want to be upgraded, you won’t be. Right now, they only support one version of the Azure OS. This has to be a precursor to the .NET 4 rollout, and something we have been trying to get them to include since our very first meeting with the Azure Team back in November 2008.  I haven’t looked at the feature in detail, but I’m glad they’ve addressed the concern.

My guess is that they will have to spin up .NET 4.0 support well before the commercial launch of .NET 4 because of the integral role of Azure in VS2010, and that in order for final testing to happen, they’ll have to allow full .NET 4.0 Azure deployments. Kind of a chicken and egg thing.  Stay tuned.

Setting up VS2008 For Windows Mobile 6.1 Development

There are a few tricks to setting up your PC for Windows Mobile 6.1 Development that are needed to get moving.  Of course some of this will depend on exactly what you want to do in Windows Mobile.

My project was pretty simple.

1. Create a Windows Mobile Forms app that interfaces with a Motorola M9090-G scanning device that allows a user of the scanner to scan their employee badge barcode, a barcode for a shipping document, and a barcode for a series of packages.
2. The user will scan a large number of packages, and then send their scan records in a batch to a central database for further processing.  The user may or may not be close to a wireless access point at the time of the scan.
3. The app has to be fast.   The folks using this device will fly through dozens of packages a minute, and there will be multiple scanners working to unload a truck, but there are logical gaps in the loading and unloading where the app can upload to the database.

It’s pretty obvious I needed a client cache for the data.  I chose Microsoft SQL Server CE.  For the backend data store, we’re using SQL Server 2008 (with Change Tracking turned on)

I didn’t want to custom build a synchronization methodology, and since I played with Microsoft Sync Services a bit last spring on another project, it seemed like a good place to start.

First off, VS2008 SP1 comes with a number of emulators built in, but no Windows Mobile 6 emulators.  In order to get the right emulators installed, download the following, and install in the following order.  You’ll need to shut down VS2008 to complete this install.

1. Windows Mobile 6 Profession and Standard Software Development Kits Refresh
2. Windows Mobile 6 Professional Images (USA).msi
3. Microsoft Windows Mobile Device Center Driver
4. Microsoft SQL Server CE for Devices
5. Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET for devices – note that you cannot user Sync Services 2.0, as it is not device ready yet.

You should now be able to fire up VS2008 and create a new Smart Device Project.  Make sure you set it up for Windows Mobile 6, or you’ll not have all the options you need, and will have to start over.

One mistake I made, was not realizing that there is a different version of Microsoft SQL Server CE for Devices than for PCs.  You will need to download the correct version to get everything to work.

I strongly suggest creating two solutions for this type of an application.  One for the Mobile client, and one for the WCF Service, whether it be a Windows Service or a Web Service.  It makes it a lot easier to debug, and helps to ensure that you don’t try to deploy Mobile targeted assemblies to the server and vice versa.  The IDE should prevent you from doing it, but it doesn’t hurt to take this approach anyway.

I like writing code, but I like getting projects done even more.  So if I find code out there that works, I’m not afraid to put it to use.  There were a couple of projects I found that really help to do some of the heavy lifting:

1. SyncComm on Codeplex.  This provides you with all the plumbing you need to get Windows Mobile Sync working in your project.  If there is one thing I would change (and did) in the project, it was to break the ClientService.cs up into another partial class to remove the customizations that were done to it.  I have found three methods that I moved into a separate file.  Otherwise the code gets wiped out when you regenerate it.  Cost me an hour of work.  See code below.
2. Custom Message Encoder: Compression Encoder on MSDN.  Download the sample there.  The download link is trickily hidden under the title of the article.  This provides you with all kinds of samples.  The one you want to go to is under <installroot>\WCFSamples\WCF\Extensibility\MessageEncoder\Compression\CS.  Take the GZipEncoder and add the project to your server solution.

public ServerClient(System.ServiceModel.EndpointAddress endPointAddress, BindingType bindingType)

        : this(GetBinding(bindingType), endPointAddress)

    { }

    static Binding GetBinding(BindingType bindingType)

    {

        Binding binding;

        switch (bindingType)

        {

            case BindingType.Basic:

                binding = CreateDefaultBinding();

                break;

            case BindingType.Compressed:

                binding = CreateCompressionBinding();

                break;

            default:

                throw new ArgumentException("BindingType value not excepted");

        }

        return binding;

    }

    //NOTE:

    //set compressed endpoint binding custom properties here

    public static Binding CreateCompressionBinding()

    {

        // Create a CustomBinding

        var customBinding = new CustomBinding();

        // Create a compression binding element

        var compressionBindingElmnt = new CompressionMessageEncodingBindingElement();

        // ..and add to the custom binding

        customBinding.Elements.Add(compressionBindingElmnt);

        // Create an HttpTransportBindingElement and add that as well

        var httpBindingElement = new HttpTransportBindingElement();

        //TODO

        //Set here desired values. Take care to match such values 

        //in app.config in SyncComm host project

        //max buffer size

        //httpBindingElement.MaxBufferSize = int.MaxValue;

        //max received message size

        //httpBindingElement.MaxReceivedMessageSize = long.MaxValue;

        //max buffer pool size

        //httpBindingElement.MaxBufferPoolSize = long.MaxValue;

        customBinding.Elements.Add(httpBindingElement);

        return customBinding;

    }

In order to get WCF to connect from the Windows Mobile 6 Emulator to a Web Service on the local host, you’ll need to follow the steps listed by Chris Brandsma on StackOverflow.  This is critical and can cause a lot of frustration if you don’t do it.

So as of today, I have a client on my Windows 6 Emulator, a Web Service, and the basic data flowing, though I have a lot of work left to do to test and refine the processing, and to test on an actual device.  I’m sure I’ll find a few more issues, but I wanted to note what I had done to this point, just in case I need to replicate the process on another PC or build server here in the near future.

Let me know if this doesn’t work for you.

Windows Mobile versus Windows CE

As I explore the wonderful world of really small screens, I’m having to choose between Windows CE and Windows Mobile.  There are pros and cons to both, and what I’m going to list below is just what I think I know at the moment.  Of course what I thought I knew on Friday has changed a bunch, so I’m sure I’ll be contradicting myself in later posts, if not calling myself a complete idiot.

Windows CE is a term used to describe a variable set of OS components that can be deployed to small devices with limited memory and storage.  If you look at the .NET Framework options available in CE apps, you’ve got very little available.  Certainly no WPF, no Silverlight, no native WCF.  You basically need to build up your OS as you go with these components.

Windows Mobile is built on top of CE, but comes with a more standard (i.e. heavier) package of components and applications built into the OS.  The basic environment to run the application is baked in, but you can add elements from CE type SDKs as needed.

At this point, there seems to be the following CE Environments:

• 4.2 – Deprecated and generally not supported
• 5.0 – Most devices can run 5.0.  Its like the XP of the Device world.
• 6.x – Various incantations of 6.0 are out there, but the adoption rate by the major vendors is slow.  Motorola (who bought Symbol), is the big player in the scanner market, and they’re just releasing their 6.x machines this year, and 6.x hit the market in 2006.

Windows Mobile is on a slightly different pace

• 5.0 – Seems to be fading fast
• 6.0, 6.1 – Are the mainstay of the Windows Mobile Market place, though being surpassed on phones by 6.5
• 6.5 – The current version, though wikipedia says it was never really planned.  It just sort of happened.  I hate it when that happens.
• 7.0 – The light at the end of the tunnel, coming out sometime this year.  Rumors are swirling that the whole OS will be built in Silverlight.  Microsoft has to come out with something just kick ass to stay relevant in the market.  If Windows Mobile 7 is still based on CE, then that’s a good indication, that they’ve given up on everything except bar code readers.

As I was evaluating the various options, I got that creepy feeling with Windows CE, that if I tied my client to it, or worse, spent the year learning it myself, it would be obsolete before the calendar read 2011.  I was also finding it really difficult to just get going with it, finding the tools I needed to build the software, figuring out how to deploy it, and how to build an emulator for it.  I can’t say that from an architectural perspective, it’s a bad product, but in my gut, I knew it was a dead end.  It hasn’t updated in 4 years.  Even COBOL has been updated in the last 4 years, right?

So I switched my project over to target Windows Mobile 6.1, and within an hour or two (most of that being downloads of SDKs), I was up and running, and realizing just how little real-estate is on a 240px-320px screen.  Now it’s a matter of figuring out Windows Synchronization Services, and I’m off and running.

Tomorrow, I’ll post what I did to get my Visual Studio 2008 ready to build and test the Windows Mobile app, which is something I need to document anyway, since I’ll be getting a new work computer soon, and will need to reinstall it anyway.

Let me know if you think my evaluation is off target.  I’d appreciate the feedback.

Windows Devices

I recently took on a new project at work to build a custom scanning app for one of our customers.  It’s a brand new system, likely to be built on the Motorola (ex-Symbol) MC3090-G or MC90900G platform using either Windows CE or Windows Mobile as the base environment.

I’ve never worked on a mobile device, and the first three days has been something of an adventure.  I’d love to use Silverlight, but the 3090 doesn’t seem to support it.  I’d love to use the Microsoft Sync Framework 2.0, but it looks like that SyncFX 2 does not work on CE, and I’ll have to use 1.0.  I may end up spinning up my own sync processor since the database is dead simple (1, maybe 2 tables). 

What’s weird is that a year ago I was struggling as an early adopter to learn all new concepts for Azure, a new technology with little documentation and an unstable base.  Now I’m trying to use technology that’s been around for quite a while, and changes a lot more slowly than Azure and Windows Desktop, yet the process of learning is just as hard because the documentation all dates back to 2006-2007 and my gut says ‘don’t trust it, it’s old’.

So over the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging more about CE / Win Mobile.  Hopefully others will find this useful to get started, and maybe, just maybe, someone will read this, and be able to point me in the right direction.

Anyone at Microsoft need an early adopter for Windows Mobile 7 + Silverlight on a scanner?  Let me know.  I may consider it if I can’t figure out the other ways sooner than that.