TamsPPC – the PocketPC Blog

HTC’s CEO was extremely untalkative when it came to carrier partners and network configurations for the upcoming Touch Pro 2 – which is understandable, as the Touch Pro still has a few US markets to satisfy.

Nevertheless, the folks at the Boy Genius Report have uncovered very interesting screenshots from the inventory system of a Canadian carrier – the most interesting quote is below:

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While nothing is confirmed, we have to think we’re looking at EV-DO Rev. A for both handsets along with dual-band GSM as the World Edition moniker implies
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As of now, no further information is available – stay tuned!

I stumbled across this book at a Viennese store specializing in book blow-out sales. As I was planning an advertising campaign at that time, I purchased it…expecting to find all kinds of cool stuff. But could it stack up?

First of all: this book covers dynamic campaigns implemented with Flash. This means that the included images alone don’t tell the full story – you have to read the book and look at the included DVD on a PC in order to fully grasp a campaign.

Advertising OnLine divides its campaigns by their subject matter: the chapters cover Food&Beverage, Media, Service&Retailer, Technology&Games, Transport and Miscellaneous ads. Each ad campaign is given one to three pages worth of photos and a badly-written description text (which comes in three languages:). While some campaigns are straightforward or boring, some of the ideas really made me think. For example, did you ever think about using an IM bot as advertising tool?

Mobile computing freaks will be happy to hear that the book covers various advertising campaigns for phones: Nokia, Motorola and the now-defunct Siemens Mobile are all in the mix.

The aforementioned chapters are divided by interviews with various creatives: as the book was written in 2005, these serve more as amusing reading than as insight.

Like with most photo books, the paper quality is insanely high. The entire book is printed on semi-glossy paper, which makes the pictures look lovely. Unfortunately, the text is very unclear and full of grammatical errors…I often read all three (English, German, French) versions of the text in order to grasp its meaning.

In the end, people expecting to learn about making the most of a small ad space will be gravely disappointed with the book. It instead looks at what future technologies like ShockWave and Flash can achieve (or will be able to achieve in the future) compared to classic GIF banners. If you ever wondered why banner designers use flash, like picture books and have 26$ and some time to spare, hit this Amazon link…

The world-wide Sudoku craze is starting to ebb off – unfortunately, Mr. Lee’s book has been laying around in our labs for quite some time. So far so good: is it still worth buying?

Programming Sudoku is divided into seven chapters. The first looks at the rules of the game and can serve as an excellent introduction to the game for beginners and people who never cared about Sudoku puzzles(e.g. yours truly).

The second chapter looks at Visual Basic.NET and at designing applications for Windows. A nice load of basics are transported in the process: people who can program in C or VB6 will be able to pick the ball with ease.

The next three chapters look at various algorithmic tricks that can be used to tackle Sudoku puzzles. Even though Sudoku itself is straightforward, solving “difficult” puzzles can require extremely sophisticated and interesting algorithms…

Chapter six is especially interesting: it looks at methods for generating puzzles. Toppling around solving algorithms generally is a very interesting approach: this tome takes it to the max.

Finally, an appendix looks at a soduku derivative called Kakuro…

Wei-Meng Lee did an excellent job clarifying key concepts. The sample code is easy to understand, images are deployed wherever they are useful:

In the end, Programming Sudoku is an excellent read for people who feel like reading up on methods for solving puzzles with a PC. The methods learned here probably can be applied to other games easily… However, the book has an additional positive effect: it serves as a quick introduction into Visual Basic.NET. If you currently develop Palm apps and plan to move over to .NET CF, getting this book will pay out. As for the price: at 17$@Amazon’s , it’s a total bargain!

Books on the .NET Compact Framework are very hard to find. Addison Wesley’s classic “Building solutions with the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework” has been on the market for ages and was considered a standard work by many when it came out 2004. Is it still worth reading in the age of .NET CF 2.x?

The book starts out with a broad look at the enterprise device landscape, the development options and at the various flavors of Windows CE. It also gives an overview of what the .NET CF can do well and what it can’t – people who have not programmed for the .NET CF before will definitely benefit a lot from this.

The second part looks at an enterprise application’s “architecture” – that is, at data storage and synchronization. Multiple chapters are dedicated to each of the fields, each one of them presents every possible concept in considerable detail(with a nice bit of sample code). I especially enjoyed the chapters on data synchronization related to the SQL Server CE – knowing this has saved me literally hundreds of man hours on a project that I currently pursue.

Part 3 is a “smorgasboard” of various interesting items. Fox&Box introduce you to things like localization, application deployment and security – topics that are very important in everyday life, but are very hard to get a grip on without proper documentation.

The book is very well written and easily understandable for anyone with a bit of Visual Basic experience. Graphics and tables like the one below help you when it comes to understanding complex problems:

In the end, the ever-famous Fox&Box book IMHO is a tome that belongs into each and every .NET CF coder’s claws. While it does not contain hundreds of step-by-step recipes(or a thorough introduction into Windows Mobile); it gives you a quick overview of the development landscape. This will come in handy when looking for actual sample code – and helps you avoid unnecessary duplication of code already contained in the framework. The price of 40$ at Amazon’s is a bit steep(seeing that small parts of the book are outdated), but still justified…

Microsoft’s ‘in-house’ languages(Visual Basic, C#,…) have undergone significant changes with each release of the Visual Studio IDE. The VB found in Visual Studio 2005 was completely different to the one I knew from my VB6 days…can O’Reilly’s Developer’s Notebook get me updated?

Matthew MacDonald starts off by looking at the IDE itself – what changed, and more importantly, what’s in it for me. Many of the hints given herein can be significant time-savers(e.g. the automatic documentation generation). After that, the book goes on to look at various new aspects of the Visual Basic language. VB6 coders like me will find great value in these chapters; as they omit what you already know.

Two chapters on Windows and Web applications follow. These are written in a ‘cook book’ style – if you need what’s described, read it and party. If not, reading the code anyways shows you interesting facets of VB2005(for example, did you know about the IsNot operator?).

A chapter on all kinds of data-related tasks is included – its style follows the chapters before it. Last but not least, a chapter on the .NET framework looks at interesting ‘miscellanea’ like code performance timing and deployment – while I still miss a recipe on the insanely tedious process of creating an installer for a .NET CF application; it made a great read nevertheless.

O’Reilly books traditionally are well-written and easy to read; I am happy to say that this one makes no difference. The paper used is of good quality, too…the unusual page design helps a lot when making notes:

In the end, Matthew MacDonald’s book makes a great ‘hint book’ showing a lot of cool ‘gems’ that a developer could otherwise miss easily. While it cannot replace a structured introduction to VB; the hints contained can be worth their price in gold. If you have 22$ spare, add the book to your next Amazon order!