TamsPPC - the PocketPC Blog

A thread on PocketNow.com comparing the home screen of various versions of the Windows Mobile UI have made me think about what really disturbs me about Windows Mobile. After quite a bit of thinking,. I think that I have found my culprit…it’s the annoying top and bottom toolbars which IMHO are way to wide(especially in landscape mode):

If the image above wouldn’t be so sad, one could laugh about it for hours. A spreadsheet cell is tinner than the bottom toolbar, and the same is valid for the bottom one.

My personal request to the Windows Mobile team can be expressed easily - but the toolbar size by half. They are still tappable(case frames aid inaccurate users) - and we could get a nice extra bit of information on-screen!

The lack of a color picker dialog in the .NET CF(yes, the desktop framework has a ColorPicker class - but .NET CF doesn’t contain it) has annoyed hell out of me for quite some time - even the 10yr old Palm OS contains a well-done color picker. Anyways, problems are here to be solved - please allow me to present you my own ColorPicker(running in .NET CF 2.0 on a hp rx4240, blots are due to GIF compression):

Using this is very simple - just download the form file here and integrate it into your project like you would do with any other form.

Then, do the following to make the user pick a color:

Dim colorX as color
colorX = ColorPicker.getcolor()


Feel free to do with this code whatever you feel like. However, no warranties are given on anything….and posting a link to an app that uses it always is appreciated!

I am in a pretty bad mood about this…please forgive me the slightly aggressive slant

I am a programmer who takes pride in designing his UI’s himself - and indeed, many of my Palm OS applications have won awards for simple and well-done interfacing. For me, popping up a dialog over another form is a standard issue - it looks like this on a Palm:

The code for doing this is approx 1 line long; and all you need to do is set the form dimensions and popup styles in Resource XML.

Creating such a dialog is next to impossible on the PocketPC in vb.net - for some strange reason, this absolutely operating system insists on making each and every form “full-screen” - even if you set the dimensions differently(even explicitly in code). All this while a MessageBox floats around the screen merrily…

However, I am not alone with this problem. Looking around in the CF newsgroup brought along the following gem of a thread:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.compactframework&tid=57f3a71b-7166-4b7b-98d6-003453f86c7c&p=1

Essentially, it all comes down to setting FormBorderStyle to none. You then have a form that doesn’t get resized automatically and can be popped up with Form.ShowDialog - but it doesn’t have a frame or title area.

Fabien Decret has a writeup on the “gory details” and also covers creating a simple border around the form - visit his blog here:
http://fabdecret.blogspot.com/2007/05/non-full-screen-window.html

How do you create a popup window in .net CF? If you have an idea, please email it to me at Tamog AT gmx DOT at!