Wiley Professional Microsoft Smartphone Programming
Contents
1. Introduction to Microsoft Smartphone Mobile computing is everywhere today The number of cell phones PDAs and other handheld mobile devices has exceeded the number of computers in the world The Yankee Group estimates that there are approximately 1 8 billion mobile devices in use worldwide used for a variety of tasks including the still predominant voice communication text messaging web surfing e mail gaming and so on As wireless technologies such as 3G cellular systems wireless LANs Bluetooth WiMAX and Ultra Wideband continue to mature empowering those mobile devices and the network infrastructure we soon will be able to enjoy the power of mobile computing any where anytime and on any devices What will ultimately cause this vision to materialize are new mobile applications and services built on the pervasive computing infrastructure along with a set of software platforms and pro gramming tools Motivated by this vision we decided to write a book on one of the most powerful software platforms for mobile computing the Microsoft Smartphone This chapter begins with a brief introduction to smartphones and the challenges of developing smartphone applications Then we introduce Microsoft Windows Mobile and some related technologies Readers will likely find this section informative as it clarifies some terms and concepts pertinent to Microsoft Smartphone What Is a Smartphone The worldwide mobile wireless industry is quickly2. and then Chief Software Architect of Microsoft introduced his vision for the smart phone at the 2004 Mobile Developer Conference The pocket devices phone and PDA really the trend is to have the best of both together The phone is no longer just a voice only device more and more it has that rich color screen A PDA is no longer a dis connected device more and more it s got the ability to make calls and connect up to wireless data net works In many cases that will be both the wide area data networks 2 G or 3G networks but also increasingly you ll have WiFi connectivity built into the device as well So it will be able to connect up to whichever network is available whichever one provides the best bandwidth and economics there An increasing number of high end cell phones and smartphones are equipped with powerful mobile processors such as ARM processors 64 128MB memory 256 512MB flash storage and even 2 4GB hard drives Examples include the Motorola Q SPV C600 and O2 XDA II Some smartphones are PDA based with handwritten recognition or a tiny keyboard and phone functions as add on features such as Palm Xplore and Palm Treo In fact cell phone manufacturers and PDA manufacturers have different views regarding the future of smartphone devices Unsurprisingly each camp believes their device will prevail with add on functionality of devices from the other side As wireless technologies and the mobile market continue to evolve i
3. provides the Smartphone 2005 SDK for ISVs independent software vendors Developers can use the Smartphone SDK in conjunction with Visual Studio 2005 the flagship program ming environment tool from Microsoft for NET Compact Framework based managed code application Chapter 1 development The Smartphone SDK also allows C or C unmanaged application programming utiliz ing Win32 APIs using Microsoft embedded Visual C eVC The next version of Windows Mobile is called Windows Mobile 6 0 and code named Photon Windows Mobile 5 0 unifies application development for Smartphones and Pocket PCs by providing the same Win32 APIs and a set of development tools Unlike the previous version of Windows Mobile Windows Mobile 2003 which does not allow developers to use SQL Server CE in Smartphone applica tions now both Pocket PC and Smartphone platforms can take advantage of the same set of common data services provided by SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition the next release of SQL Server CE In addi tion both platforms share the same security model and the same common application installer The uni fication of these two platforms reflects Microsoft s mobile platform strategy in response to the imminent convergence of these two types of mobile devices In addition Windows Mobile 5 0 provides a new set of standardized WinCE APIs including multimedia APIs supporting Windows Media 10 Mobile Direct 3D Mobile APIs new GPS APIs DirectDraw APIs and camer
4. OS which is funded and supported by cell phone makers such as Nokia Sony Ericsson Siemens and others Palm is historically strong in the PDA market For people with a background in those types of platforms it is necessary to present a quick tour into Microsoft Smartphone Those of you who have used a Smartphone device for some time can feel free to skip this section To a typical user a Smartphone is a much more powerful cell phone It provides many more types of applications and the user interface is more sophisticated than a traditional cell phone Like most other cell phones a Microsoft Smartphone actually refers to a combination of the handset and its running applications The aesthetic design of a smartphone handset may vary significantly but the principle user interface how a user interacts with the device is almost the same across different devices from dif ferent manufacturers Let s take a look at the Smartphone emulator a software tool that helps developers quickly develop and test Smartphone applications without using a physical device Details about the Smartphone emulator can be found in Chapter 3 Introduction to Microsoft Smartphone Figure 1 1 depicts a common layout of a Smartphone device Although color doesn t appear in these screenshots a color screen at the top and the number keys at the bottom are the most common elements What separates a Smartphone from a PDA are the software keys Notice the two soft keys l
5. a APIs These APIs essentially extend the functionality of a Windows Mobile device and offer an improved user experience On the managed application environment side Windows Mobile 5 0 comes with NET Compact Framework 2 0 and provides a set of INET managed APIs for messaging and telephony which are not available in NET 1 0 and 1 1 Chapter 2 discusses the NET Compact Framework in detail Application development on Windows Mobile 5 0 can further take advantage of the latest release of Microsoft s flagship IDE Visual Studio 2005 The software emulator in Visual Studio 2005 has been rewritten to eliminate the gap between emulation and physical device deployment In addition both managed and unmanaged code can be developed within the same Visual Studio 2005 environment No eVC is needed anymore Additionally Visual Studio 2005 includes a number of improvements in the form designer and deployment tools as well as common programming and debugging support This book uses Visual Studio 2005 as the application development platform so you will see screenshots taken from it and code developed using a set of smart device tools integrated into Visual Studio 2005 Microsoft Smartphone from a User s Perspective The market for cell phone operating systems is highly segmented Many cell phones run operating systems other than Microsoft Smartphone indeed Microsoft is relatively new to the cell phone platform market The stronghold in this market is Symbian
6. ation development is facili tated by the Palm OS 68K and Protein SDKs and some commercial developer suites A developer suite is an integrated software tool that enables developers to create both ARM native and Palm OS Protein powered applications for Palm OS Cobalt and 68K applications Chapter 1 Mobile Data Service and Entertainment This category includes real time location based navigation assistance coupled with traffic data access mobile gaming rich media services and so on Mapping and GPS based navigation services are increas ingly being integrated into general purpose smartphone platforms Mobile television services have been available in the United States and some Asian countries online music download services such as Apple s iTunes service are available on some high end smartphones mass media companies music and movie companies online gaming service providers and of course the consumer will be involved in this category of services and applications Needless to say the aforementioned summary is by no means exhaustive however it is indicative of the broad range of new services and applications with tremendous potential for businesses Indeed the enormous opportunity of next generation mobile computing has created myriad services and applica tions that will likely continue to mature and succeed in the foreseeable future What all these services and applications share is a reliance on software running on smartphone
7. cessing In addition to mobile enterprise law enforcement educational and healthcare organizations may also uti lize these services and solutions to improve productivity and reduce costs Other Mobile Software Platforms Symbian OS is developed by Symbian a company supported by several cell phone manufacturers including Nokia Ericsson Sony Ericsson and Samsung Originally based on the EPOC operating system Symbian OS defines several UI reference models for different types of devices Symbian OS uses EPOC C a pure object oriented lan guage as the supporting programming language for both system services implementa tions and APIs It also allows Java applications for mobile devices Java 2 Micro Edition J2ME applications to run on top of a small Java runtime environment The Symbian Developer website www symbian com developer provides numerous technical documents for Symbian OS SDKs and sample code as well as information on Symbian OS development and the Symbian developer community Palm OS developed by Palm Inc is a preemptive multitasking operating system for Palm PDAs and cell phones Palm OS supports both the ARM and Motorola 68000 architectures Developers can choose a programming language from C C Visual Basic or Java although C is most widely used for Palm OS software development Interested readers can visit the Palm OS developer site www palmsource com developers for more technical details Palm OS applic
8. eft and right directly below the screen These correspond to the menu bar and commands at the bottom of the screen Depending on how applications define the functions of the menu bar these soft keys may perform spe cific tasks Also note the five way up down left right and Select navigation pad and the four fixed function keys Call Home Hang Up and Back Pressing the Call key will bring you to the phone call screen where you can enter a phone number After you enter a phone number pressing the Call key again will initiate the call The Hang Up key of course is used when you want to end a call The Home key always takes you to the home screen shown in this figure and the Back key enables you to go back to the previous screen At the home screen pressing any number key will automatically bring you to the phone call screen Earpiece volume buttons Right soft key Left soft key Record button Home key Back key Call key Navigation pad Hang up key 1 Yi Bare DA Fake Network 8 30 PM 8 11 2005 No upcoming appointments Profile Normal Text Messages 0 Figure 1 1 Chapter 1 A Smartphone usually has a power button a record button for voice recording and two volume con trol buttons Some Smartphones have a built in camera so there will be another button for it some have a high quality digital camera such as Nokia N90 which features a Carl Zeiss lens 2 megapixel resolu ti
9. moving from traditional voice based cellular phone services to combined voice and data services as a result of increasing demand for mobile data access and the deployment of high speed wireless data services utilizing a variety of wireless technologies For example 2 5G 3G wireless services are being rolled out and used by a rapidly growing number of subscribers and the number of WiFi hotspots and residential wireless LANs continues to grow substantially The trend is clear Cell phones PDAs and portable consumer Chapter 1 electronic devices will likely merge into a single handheld device as a universal personal communicator and computing platform generally called a smartphone Indeed the market has seen a dramatic increase in smartphone sales when compared to the fairly slow growth of PDA sales worldwide Generally a smartphone is a powerful multi function cell phone that incorporates a number of PDA functionality such as a personal scheduler calendar and address book as well as the ability to access Internet services and applications using either a keypad or a stylus In addition to making a call from a smartphone users can surf the web check e mail create documents play online games update sched ules or access an enterprise network via a virtual private network VPN Wireless Internet access is enabled by means of cellular wireless networks such as GSM GPRS CDMA CDMA2000 or WCDMA among others Bill Gates Chairman
10. on and a 20x zoom The first generation Smartphone applications are mostly clones of desktop Windows applications enabling users familiar with those desktop applications to avoid learning a new one Typical Smartphone applications are Pocket Outlook calendar contacts Pocket Word Pocket Excel Windows Media Player MSN messenger games and some accessories The second generation Smartphone appli cations are exclusively designed to leverage the advantages of mobility and ubiquitous wireless access In the next several years we will see a whole new set of applications that utilize real time location infor mation in conjunction with always on wireless data access Overall the design of a Smartphone aims to take advantage of a user s prior experience with Windows desktop systems After all a Smartphone is a small computer running a stripped down version of the Windows operating system This greatly helps users familiar with Palm or Symbian cell phones because the learning curve is largely eliminated Summary 10 This chapter introduced the concept of the smartphone and the trend of convergence in the mobile com puting and communication domain As a converged mobile device smartphone in conjunction with supporting new mobile wireless services and applications will gain widespread popularity worldwide in the foreseeable future Microsoft Windows Mobile is a software platform that enables fast efficient and feature rich application devel
11. opment for Smartphone devices Many smartphone and cell phone manufacturers including Palm which traditionally uses Palm OS on their PDAs and smartphones have started to use Windows Mobile as the underlying software platform on their products largely because users can leverage their knowledge of Windows desktop systems in using a Smartphone Beginning with the next chapter our discussion moves to the technical foundations of Windows Mobile We will focus on the core components of the NET Compact Framework as well as the class libraries and type systems of NET In addition a primer on the C programming language will be provided
12. osition in the next wave of mobile computing These services and applications essentially leverage the increasingly high computing capability supplied by the cell phone and the flexible high speed wire less connectivity to offer an efficient reliable and rich experience to the end user This section summa rizes the potential services and applications in this domain Mobile Commerce This category includes mobile banking location based business information service and shopping assis tance mobile advertising and mobile payment among other services Japan and Korea already offer widespread mobile payment applications that enable consumers to make purchases at a convenience store by waving the cell phone past a reading device Numerous startup companies in the United States are developing applications that enable credit card payments to be verified parking fees to be paid at the meter and social networking Industries involved in this category include banks credit card compa nies retail stores stock trading agencies and online businesses Mobile Enterprise Services and applications in this category are concerned with mobile worker assistance such as real time job scheduling route planning package delivery updates mobile collaboration and communication and mobile business transaction Moreover enterprise resource planning ERP applications and supply chain management SCM systems can be extended to support mobile access and onsite pro
13. reby mobile nodes essentially serve each other without relying on a central server Web services is a good example of offloading computation to the server Chapter 9 XML and Web Services provides more details about accessing web services on a smartphone Power management is also crucial to increasing battery life Smartphone oper ating systems must be able to put the device into power save state whenever possible subject to a user s configuration to save battery power Q High security In a sense a smartphone can be viewed as another form of personal identifica tion with sensitive data stored and transmitted over the air There have been a number of cell phone telated security hacks utilizing various vulnerabilities of cell applications As the smart phone evolves to function not only as a telephone but also as a credit card or ID card the com promise of a cell phone will result in serious problems Low overhead authentication and authorization must be enforced for critical smartphone applications Chapter 12 Device and Application Security and Chapter 13 Data and Communication Security cover smartphone security issues Introducing Microsoft Windows Mobile To facilitate the design and development of smartphone applications hardware manufactures and soft ware vendors have teamed up to provide powerful programming tools for smartphone developers One of the solutions is Microsoft s Windows Mobile a unified platform
14. s to reach the end user To this end software designers and developers have to be aware of the challenges and obstacles involved in smartphone based application development Challenges of Smartphone Application Development The application design paradigm for smartphones not only differs largely from that of desktop applica tions it also has some inherent requirements that separate it from application development on common mobile devices First the hardware constraints of a smartphone such as processor speed persistent stor age capacity battery and wireless connection significantly affect the application design principles Second the input method of a smartphone either a telephone keypad with additional navigation keys or a soft keyboard forces application developers to pay more attention to the GUI of a smartphone application than that of desktop applications Third the cost of wireless data service remains a major factor for mass adoption of Smartphone technology as it is still quite high compared with the cost of landline Internet services Moreover the application must be easily ported to various hardware plat forms using different processor architectures and peripherals Following are the salient factors to con sider while developing applications for smartphones Q Efficient storage and adaptive networking Despite the advancements in mobile embedded and wireless technologies smartphones usually have neither a large memory capacit
15. specifically designed to enable devel opers to leverage Windows desktop programming experiences for mobile application design and devel opment targeting both smartphones and PDAs Because of the innovative NET Compact Framework and bundled programming tools Microsoft Windows Mobile for Smartphone has gained a sizable amount of popularity among software developers worldwide Windows Mobile is Microsoft s software platform for Pocket PCs PDAs running Microsoft s software platforms and Smartphones smartphones running Microsoft s software platform Here the notion of software platform refers to an integrated computing environment that consists of an operating system the NET runtime environment a set of applications and related application development tools The concepts of Pocket PC and Smartphone are also commonly referred to as software platforms target ing PDAs and smartphones respectively Windows Mobile 5 0 The latest version of Microsoft Windows Mobile is Windows Mobile 5 0 Windows Mobile consists of a tailored Windows CE operating system the Microsoft NET Compact Framework the runtime and the class libraries a set of tools and APIs for native code development a device software emulator and for developers an IDE Integrated Development Environment component for Visual Studio 2005 Windows Mobile 5 0 is based on the Windows CE NET 5 0 operating system As part of the Smartphone offering Microsoft also
16. t is still too early to tell which approach will finally win Nevertheless one thing is certain They both need reliable high performance low power consumption operating systems and software to leverage the wireless services Microsoft Smartphone refers to Microsoft s platform for next generation cell phones basically a soft ware architecture with Windows CE as the operating system plus a rich set of applications such as Pocket Internet Explorer and Pocket Outlook and powerful software development tools such as NET Compact Framework and Visual Studio 2005 We use Smartphone to refer to Microsoft Smartphone throughout this book and smartphone to refer to general multifunction cell phones This book focuses on software development issues and practices on smartphones running Microsoft Windows Mobile software There are of course other software development solutions For example Palm Inc also provides a software development kit SDK for Palm OS smartphones and you can find an SDK and supporting tools for Symbian OS another popular cell phone operating system Smartphone Applications and Services With the vision of mobile convergence supporting communication and computing on a single set of hardware components mobile wireless network operators cell phone manufactures and independent Introduction to Microsoft Smartphone software vendors are working together to create new applications and services with the hope of taking a lead p
17. y nor a reli able high bandwidth wireless connection It is crucial therefore to make better use of precious local storage for high performance The networking functionality of a smartphone must be able to adapt to the comparatively low bandwidth and high drop rate of wireless links Finally remote data access must be able to function in disconnected mode For a more detailed discus sion of data access on a smartphone see Chapters 5 and 6 Q Simple and user friendly GUI Because entering characters on a smartphone is not as easy as typing on a PC keyboard although some teenagers will disagree a program s GUI has to deal with most of the input by using graphical components Due to a smartphone s relatively small screen the layout of these components on a window as well as the grouping of components into different windows has to been designed carefully For example you generally should elim inate horizontal scrolling for a smartphone application GUI design is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4 Introduction to Microsoft Smartphone Q Lightweight computation and power management A smartphone is not designed for CPU intensive applications instead most CPU intensive computation should be done on the server side which is typically much more powerful than a mobile processor of an application when ever possible enabling the client side on a smartphone to run faster This creates a scenario for peer to peer mobile applications whe
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