Kivanc Ozuolmez

For an internal competition project here in Avanade, my colleagues and I implemented a location aware service works on the cloud. So I’ve many outcomes from that project and want to share them with you. Our aim was to go get the a location data, based on Latitude and Longitude but alas our HTC Touch devices don’t have GPS hardware installed in. So I decided to go for GSM CellID based location awareness and worked quite well. So here is the first step to demonstrate the basic structure on how to get GSM CellId with couple of lines C# code. I just referred to MSDN codebase the RIL_GetCellTowerInfo function in the Radio Interface Layer (RIL) API. 

        1.Call RIL_Initialize to get a RIL handle

        2. Call RIL_GetCellTowerInfo to get the information about the cell tower the phone is connected to

       3. Call RIL_Deinitialize to release the RIL handle

You can find the code here. GetCellDetails.rar (24.03 kb)  I’ll add other steps to decode geo info (latitude and longitude data) from that cellID identifiers soon. Meanwhile you can check http://www.opencellid.org/ and similar services from other public or commercial vendors and get more info on GSM CellID.

Peter Nowak has published a complete library on CodePlex for creating Managed Services for Windows Mobile.

Project Description

This lightweight library contains functionality for creating Windows like Services in managed code, as creating Windows Services in Windows Mobile/Windows CE isn't supported. The library is compatible with the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and higher.

Details
The .NET Compact Framework doesn't offer any functionality for creating Windows Services in full managed code, as like on the .NET Framework. Therefore this library enables creating Service in managed code to be like Windows Services as near as possible.
This library bases on Pavel Bánský's blog post, on how to create Services in Windows Mobile in managed code.

Features

• Easy to use library in managed code. No P/Invoke required.
• Based on the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 for maximum compatibility.
• Extra samples to show, how to use this library.
• Service Launcher application to start services automatically on system start
• Additional Service Manager Utility is available for controlling Services similar to Windows.

Chris Tacke shows in his blogpost, how to create a Screen Capture with less than 10 lines of code. Without any P/Invoke or any more hacking, it just uses managed code. Really and very simple, thanks Chris.

I heard many complains about slow startups of mobile applications and also got questions how to increase the startup performance. In most of the projects, the problem was a design issue, just like trying to connect a remote server on startup or populating big datasets etc.. But on the other hand, if you think your startup sequance is totaly clear and correct than you may find some more things to do in general.

Take a look at the article on how to optimize the your application's loading time.
http://blogs.msdn.com/raffael/archive/2009/01/05/netcf-improve-startup-performances.aspx

As some of you may have already heard, Enterprise Library 4.1 was released by the Patterns & Practices group at Microsoft. I used to implement application blocks from Enterprise Library’s previous versions in my previous projects. So I decided to take a quick look for personal update.

Installing this version of Enterprise Library is much better than previous installations, as this one gives you the choice to extract AND build the different application blocks at the same time, instead of using a different installer to extract and build the source codes.  The change log for this release is available here (highly recommended to read).  If you’re looking to upgrade your skills with Enterprise Library, I strongly suggest the Hands On Labs and the Getting Started tutorials for each of the application blocks. 

For more information about Enterprise Library (resources, tutorials, news, etc.) I strongly recommend you referring to these sites:
Pieter's Blog on Enterprise Development
Tom Hollander's blog
Patterns And Practices Guidance

Nowadays, we all hear the term “Cloud Computing”, its benefits and some baby-steps* applications going on. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are the main promoters on this game. On my side, I like Google’s services like GMail, GDocs, Agenda etc… and on Amazon’s side EC2 seems extremely cool and powerful.  

But on the other hand two hotshots defined Could Computing as stupidity and just a business fashion. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

He said: "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign,"  

A big anti-Cloud Computing definition also came from Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, as “it is just an industry fashion.” 

They think that the personal data should definitely stay personal and advice to computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party. The growing number of people storing information on internet-accessible servers rather than on their own machines, has become a core part of the rise of Web 2.0 applications. Millions of people now upload personal data such as emails, photographs and, increasingly, their work, to sites owned by companies such as Google. 

So what are your ideas about cloud computing on relying to a third party perspective?   

* For sure the Cloud Computing applications on the market are really great but compare them to the near feature opportunities on Cloud Computing. These are relatively tiny-baby-steps.

 

For the software, itself, it is easier to discuss its quality by measuring its performance, memory usage, number of the bugs etc. But what if we talk about the code file, how can we write code that we are proud of.

And many other topics can be added to this list for code quality measurement. But we will focus on these five now.

Clarity

Probably you have seen a really “smart” code like the one below:

   1:    public static int GetNextSize(int i)

   2:    {

   3:      //multiply it by four and make sure it is positive

   4:      return i > 0 ? i << 2 : ~(i << 2) + 1;

   5:    }

At least we have a comment line; well we will discuss the comments later on. But as you see you should really focus and evaluate the code before understanding what it is doing. So hiding the code in this way, especially if you work in a team, will create big headaches for your team members and after a while, for you, too. Code should always be clear and transparent for everyone just like the one below.
 

   1:    public static int GetNextSize(int i)

   2:    {

   3:      return Math.Abs(i * 4);  

   4:    }

Steve McConnell : "Good code is its own best documentation."