The following is a step by step for configuring the GlobalSat BT-338 with a Windows Mobile 5 device (such as the K-Jam or QTEK 9100).  However this should work with any bluetooth Gps and WM5 device. Pairing the Bluetooth Gps with WM5 Open the Comm Manager in programs or from the Today Screen Turn on Bluetooth Select Settings > Bluetooth Settings Click the Devices Tab Click New Partnership (ensure your Gps is on first) You may be prompted for a passkey - the BT-338 uses: 0000 Click Finish Click the COM Ports tab (shown below) Click New Outgoing Port, select the BT...

There is a current series of 13 WebCasts on Mobile development by Maarten Struys over at http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/webcast/ that are well worth checking out if you are working with WM5.  In part 6 he shows a way of creating a splash screen on a separate thread, which is pretty neat.  I have summarised the steps here, since I have not seen them on the web before, but I urge you to view the webcasts for more detail on this and many more topics. Main Form Create the following variables for your main form (you need to add System.Threading to your namespaces): private Thread splashScreenThread;private AutoResetEvent...

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Couple of nasty bugs from the Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Telephony namespace that you need to be aware of if your are using this api.  I post them here just to try and help raise the profile of them, since they pretty much break the api if you are not aware of them! Phone.Talk adds invalid characters at the end of the telephone number ( see http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2006/01/03/509036.aspx) TypeLoadException thrown whenever Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Telephony is used in Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphones.( see http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2006/02/07/526845.aspx ) HTH Ian Comments are disabled for this blog - but please feel free to comment via the contact page

Windows Mobile 5 has some great new api's.  One of the most exciting ones is the ability to query a gps device to get location information.  This depends on the gps being configured on the device using the new gps connection icon in settings.  However the icon is missing on some devices (e.g. the Orange SPV M5000 and the QTEK 8100 of the devices we have tested).  This is a strange omission, but can easily be fixed with a registry edit as follows: In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ControlPanel\GPS Settings Delete the DWORD marked Hide (if present) Delete the DWORD marked Redirect (if present) Add a...

You see it goes like this...we all want all available data available now.  We want the world's information at the blink of an eye.  The smartphones and the pocket devices won't cut it - too slow, too much hassle.  Desktop machines are a joke - too tied to their desktops.  No what we need is a new sense, a "Google Sense".  So getting the information we want is as natural as seeing or hearing.  You will just conceive question, not frame it, and the data will be there.  That's the natural progression for the information revolution.  No wires, no devices, just...

Unfortunately setting the MasterPageFile in web.config is broken for the designer in the current release of VS 2005 (See http://blogs.ipona.com/davids/archive/2005/10/12/3408.aspx for details).  So here's a rough and ready simple hack that you can use to easily switch masters for a deployment. 1. Create multiple default.master files organised in a consistent folder structure.  I use Masters > SomeMaster > default.master, Masters > SomeOtherMaster > default.master etc. 2. Create a default.master in the root and create all your pages using this 3. Use a web deployment project and create an MSBuild task to copy the master you want over the one in the root.  For an example of similar...

Oh dear... I don't know why I do these things.... Ian

Here's the scenario: You use the great new DataSet designer in VS 2005 and have it generate some tableadapters for you. You want to inherit from them to add some application (business) logic and some new methods Works great, the tableadapters are not sealed and the methods you want are all virtual But when you try to bind then using the ObjectDataSource on a web page, the nice new methods you've created are not listed!This seems to be an issue with the ObjectDataSource UI because if you put them in manually in the HTML source then it works fine.  However a...