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.