Announcing Roam

Roam is a .NET CF 2 open source library for Windows Mobile devices that I've been developing off and on for the past year or so. A majority of the development has been driven off my own needs as a SmartPhone developer and HCI researcher. Although the source code is hosted on SourceForge and released under the BSD license (link), I have not had a chance to write a webpage or formal documentation. Thus, I've held off on advertising it on newsgroups/forums. I thought I would mention it here because I believe the source code could be of some use to my readers. Note that Roam requires OpenNETCF's Smart Device Framework (SDF 2.0) library. They just recently released SDF 2.1, I'm not sure if Roam is compatible or not...

Currently, the Roam library is broken down into four namespaces: Roam, Roam.Common, Roam.SqlCe, and Roam.UI. Each of these namespaces are compiled into their own assembly to save space.

1. Roam: contains media related functionality (e.g., sound player, camera media sniffer), pocket outlook related code (e.g., semi-robust SMS sending system), and low level device related utility classes (e.g., power notifications, storage card utilities, device id)
   
   
2. Roam.Common: contains code that is not-specific to Windows Mobile (i.e., this .dll also runs on the desktop). The largest subnamespace in this library is the Collections classes which include a HashSet, a Tree, a PriorityQueue, and a ReadOnlyHashtable among other things.
   
   
3. Roam.SqlCe: contains code relevant to SQL Server Mobile / Compact Edition. Currently, only two classes exist: SqlCeConnectionManager which offers thread safe connection pooling using a singleton paradigm and SqlCeWrapper which also offers thread safe access to the database by wrapping the SqlCeConnection object.
   
   
4. Roam.UI: this is the largest assembly in the Roam project. It contains many of the UI controls I've needed over the past year and were not included in .NET CF (e.g., scrollable label) I've developed a fairly simple drawing architecture that many of my custom UI classes use. Currently, Roam.UI contains custom controls for image buttons, radio list boxes, check box lists, key filtered lists, numeric text boxes and scrollable labels. In addition, Roam.UI features a set of utility classes that wrap P/Invoke calls to draw rounded rectangles, change the device's wallpaper, etc.

Below are two brief demos of Roam.UI custom controls: the TextBoxFilteredList and the ScrollableLabel. Note that the embedded videos below are hosted on YouTube which changes the aspect ratio and overall quality. :( The original source videos can be found here and here.

Purchased OpenNetCF SDF 2.0

I finally went ahead and purchased the SDF 2.0 Extensions for Visual Studio 2005 from OpenNetCF.org. It's only fifty bucks and you get the source code, which, for me, is mostly useful for educational purposes. I'm always wondering if my coding style, design, etc. are up to par. You can also use the free version of the SDF 2.0, which isn't crippled but doesn't include the source here. I used it for quite a while before deciding that I should support the OpenNetCF team.

Oh and by the way, the installer for the purchased version of SDF 2.0 takes about 15 minutes on my 3Ghz HT 1.5GB RAM Pentium 4 machine to complete. I was almost going to e-mail support that their installation package was broken but then I discovered the h2reg process, which is started by the installer, was just taking forever. I believe this is because of some of the integrated VS2005 stuff they've done in SDF 2.0. Note that the free version installs rather quickly.

Voice Recording with .NET CF

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=223831&SiteID=1

OpenNet CF 2.0 Beta1 Out Now.

http://www.opennetcf.org

Power management stuff has been greatly simplified, see:

http://blog.opennetcf.org/ctacke/PermaLink,guid,cf2c3926-e875-4a25-b635-39e227b358f5.aspx

OpenSource .NET CF

I added a link to this site (http://www.opennetcf.org/) on the right sidebar. It is a giant repository of OpenSource .NET Compact Framework source code.