Hi there!

Has anyone ever tried to implement a small Insim / Outsim / Outgauge app using .NET CF?

I tried but still do have some problems (the first and biggest one was getting visual studio .NET 2003 to work together with my hardware :-)).

At the moment I simply can't get an UDP-Connection to my server. After a lot of googling, I found one entry, stating that Active Sync (<4.0) does not support udp-connections. (http://forums.microsoft.com/MS ... ostID=605596&SiteID=1)

Therefore it seems, I'm stuck using this approach...


My idea for now is to build a small gateway-app for my PC, that establishes a tcp-connection with my PDA and converts those packets to udp-packet to talk to LFS.
What do you think about this approach? Might this be a solution?


The alternatives so far might be:
1) using bluetooth-connection instead of active sync
2) using wlan-connection instead of active sync

Both of these approaches make a solution harder to configure and bound to my special config here. Therefore I prefer the active sync approach... Using the wlan-approach, I additionally have the problem, that my wlan is on a subnet not directly reachable from my lfs-pc. While I do know how to setup a route for my pc, I don't have any idea to do this on my PDA (running WM 2003 SE).

So, what is the best way to go?
Kind Regards
Jens (Red Runner)

What is exactly what you trying to achieve?

Unless you specifically want to do something for your PDA related to LFS, I can not see the benefits of doing from CF. I've made CF applications in the past and I found it very limited, at least regarding controls and database stuff. Some methods were there but they simply didnt work...(!!)

Considering that, either using bluetooth or active sync youre gonna need to be close to your LFS PC, why not programming it in .Net directly?

One last thing: get rid of 2003 and move on to VS2005, its MUCH better.

Quote from Red Runner :

The alternatives so far might be:
1) using bluetooth-connection instead of active sync
2) using wlan-connection instead of active sync

ActiveSync is for certain things - such as syncing outlook and other applications. It is of no practical use (imho) what-so-ever for what you want. It's more of a 1 shot, press the button, wait a week and 3 hours, undock your PDA and walk away.

WLAN is perfectly acceptable and not to mention simple. All you'd need to do is write an InSim / OutSim / Outgauge client, depending on what you want to do, for your PDA. However, given that your PDA is on a different subnet (not entirely sure on the reasoning, unless you wanted to separate your network for security reasons - and even then other technology might be of better use) that rules it out

Again, bluetooth should be a reasonably acceptable option for what you want; which I'm guessing is for displaying stats.

The 3rd option maybe that your PDAs manufacturer has an SDK for talking directly to the hardware? They may even have something you're after in there. I know the Symbian stuff comes with some interesting toys, as did the HP stuff I managed to get ahold of some time ago. Just a thought

Thanks for your replies so far!

Of course, I want to write a tiny Insim / Outsim / Outgauge app, that's why I'm posting in the LFS forum and not in some .NET related newsgroup :-). Nothing special, just displaying some values like speed, rpm, maybe a shift-indicator and so on.
To make it short: No real new idea, just a new platform :-)

Maybe you're right and Active Sync is not the right platform to be used. I just found some examples on the net using it's underlying TCP/IP-connection to talk between the pda and the host computer. MS itself has a nice little example app, that lets you control your PDA from your PC, if it's in the cradle.
Therefore, this was my first approach, as Active Sync is available on every PDA, WLAN isn't.

I think, I'll have some thoughts on the WLAN approach, as it is the most "direct" way of networking. I don't know why, but I do have a lot of problems with all this bluetooth-stuff, it never works the way I want it to work.

For the moment, there are technical reasons to seperate the WLAN subnet from my home network, not security related reasons. But maybe I'll have to redesign my little network a bit.

Yes, the more I think about it, the more I do agree, that the UDP/TCP-Relay approach is not the way to go...

Ah, I nearly forgot: VS2005... Yes, I really like to try it (as we will get it at work soon, finally!), but the installer of Visual C# Express always hangs at my machine. Bad thing is: No error message, nothing. I even tried it on a clean windows installation, same problem :-(

Thx & Greetz
Jens (Red Runner)

I'm supposedly getting a new MS PocketPC based PDA phone next week, for work to replace my Nokia E61 (don't ask), so I may beable to give you a hand porting some stuff - provided I get the damn thing, and some free time of course

I've literally had my Windows Mobile 5 pda-phone a few hours. I've only started looking at it for LFS stats usage .NET wouldn't be a good choice for mine as its only powered by a 195MHz processor, and has limited RAM. However I have noticed that when connecting via a USB cable, the phone acts as a DHCP server and gives my XP machine a new virtual network adapter and I appear to beable to talk to the phone directly using its IP address (uses the local link addresses - 169.254.2.0/255.255.255.0, 169.254.2.1 being the pda, and 2+ being DHCP clients (i.e. your machine)).

Unfortunately my model doesn't like to play with WPA secured wireless access points, so unless I can find a patch to sort that out, I'm not going to be playing with its wifi at home much.

I'm about to grab the SDK and I'm gonna see what sort of stuff I can do with it. On inital inspection it looks like it can handle simple D3D work, so theres scope for interesting stuff..

Could you please keep me updated as well karl, I just bought myself an Ipaq 3950 from ebay and im trying to figure out if theres any way i could sync realtime information over the USB cable, unlike your model - my pocketpc just leeches off the host pc and isnt assigned an ip.

Is there anyway that some sort of stat reader could be built on the pocket pc to check a specific port on the host pc ?

Hi again!

In the meantime, I developed a very, very, very basic InSim / OutGauge application for my little PocketPC.

The code uses a modified version of sdether's framework.
In my oppinion, the code is not ready to be published yet (I had to try a lot of things, so the code isn't really clean), but if someone wants this as an entry point, feel free to contact me...

Regards
Red Runner