Girl Geek

Preview RSS feed reader for the PocketPC - Alpha 1

The first version of my RSS feed reader for my PocketPC is finished and operational. The user interface is still a bit bold with the larger buttons (instead of a more subtle interface like a pop-up menu or some nice icons) but my must haves are there.  

I did encounter some strange problems beside the usual limitations of the Compact Framework.

Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData) should work but gives a strange exception when there is no “Application Data“ folder in the “My Device” root on the PocketPC. I would expect this environment operation to handle this situation in a more elegant way, but for now I just worked around it and created the directory on the emulator based on where it was on my real PocketPC.

The RSS library I used is also able to write the RSS feed to file and does this using "iso-8859-1" encoding. But this encoding is not supported on the PocketPC… knowing that the exception “unsupported operation” is quite logical but it took me a while to figure that one out.

My problem with debugging the application in the emulator was finally solved by building all the projects in the solution again from scratch making sure all were CF projects. Not sure if this really was the problem but at least it solved the debugging issue and normal debugging is a lot easier than the remote debugging option (which in itself works quite well).

So what’s planned for Beta 1? First I’ll have to make it more error proof… quality has clearly not been first on my list. And then some user interface work and then… we’ll see, I hope to add some functionality in the RSS library to make it a little less picky about the XML it does like.

Figuring out the beta's

While René and Rob are at the PDC collecting the latest "need to knows" about Visual Studio Team System, I'm trying to figure out the beta combinations we can use to install the development environment for the same project Rob mentioned in his blog.

We will be using Visual Studio Team System as well as BizTalk 2006... preferably using VSTS RC1 which came available yesterday. But after downloading the RC1 this morning I'm not so sure anymore. The RC1 uses a different version of SQL Server 2005 CTP... not to much of a problem considering the environment configuration we have planned, BizTalk 2006 uses the VS2005 beta2 development environment... could be overcome although not very practical, but most of all the RC1 release notes mention that SQL should be installed on the same machine on which VSTS is installed... and I'm not sure if this is what I would like.

But first I'll have a look at the new RC1 version to see what the "significant enhancements" are...