Designed for Windows Mobile 6 logo program

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lancaster

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:sign0085: A general question to the forum please:

Have any members had any experience of taking a Basic4PPC developed application through Microsoft's "Designed for Windows Mobile 6" logo program?

I would be interested in anyones success rates at passing first time and any evidence of failure points along the way.

One problem I see with a PDA application is that "all text entry fields must be visible with the SIP up" which either restricts the real estate of the portrait screen where text boxes can be or a screen scrolling ability is required.

All tips gratefully received.

Dave Lancaster
Worcestershire UK.
 
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Picard

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I don'nt kow what Designed for Windows Mobile 6" logo program is but you can also display the data by pages whith ControlsEx.dll or programming yourself.
 
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lancaster

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Well that was an interesting exercise! Having now passed Microsoft 'Designed for Windows Mobile 6 Professional Logo Test' for one of my applications, I thought I would just drop a note here in case anyone else treads this path in the future.

Firstly, the motivation for putting the application though the test was to obtain 20 valuable Microsoft points that go towards becoming Gold Partner status. Secondly to obtain experience of the process so that future solutions can be developed with logo testing in mind (and hence more partner points).

The tested application uses interpretted SMS text messages to issue Pocket Outlook calendar appointments to remote worker's PDA devices and allows for delivery reports and optional appointments (accept/decline facility). If anyone wants a copy of the finished app, drop me a PM.

Back to the testing: The 19 page requirement document from Microsoft (see URL in ealier post) is pretty straight forward. The key things that I had to change were:

1. Use HKEY_Current_User for registry data instead of using HKEY_Local_Machine.

2. The title bar must always include the product name. I had a tendency to give each form its own title to reflect the purpose of the form. Possibly a modification for B4PPC would be to default the title property for a new form to be the same as the project's entry form.

3. Use the notifications interface and not have your own popups for events.

And the tought one:

4. The application had to adapt itself to run QVGA portrait, QVGA landscape, QVGA square, VGA portrait, VGA landscape, VGA square and 240x400. On all presentations, the SIP virtual keyboard must not overlap any text entry fields.

I made use of the routine from another posting to adjust (dynamically) each controls top, left, height, width property to suit the screen dimensions. Problems highlighted here are:

a) The form level 'image' does not appear in the list of controls() and therefore it can not be programmatically resized. I overcame this by having a separate 'background' image control, sent to the back of each form. Because this now appears in the controls() list, it can now be resized.

b) The height of some controls have limited minimum values controlled by the font size used in the control. Therefore programatically adjusting height values was often ignored leaving some overlapping controls in a landscap view. Also tried reduced font sizes for landscape and that was just a mess.

B4PPC would be even better if the designer allowed different screen orientation designs for portrait, landscape and square all within the same project. I must search the wish-list to see if this request already exists.

Allowing the developer to layout the form for each orientation would allow much better use of the available screen real-estate.

So now I am very happy to have the Microsoft Logo tick for a B4PPC developed application. Am I the first ??
 
corwin42

corwin42

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lancaster said:
On all presentations, the SIP virtual keyboard must not overlap any text entry fields.
Click to expand...

I have thought many times about this. Does anybody know, how normal .NET CF Applications do this? Many applications just simply resize the form and a Scrollbar appears if the SIP is switched on. I think there must be a very simple way to do this in plain .NET CF.

Greetings,
Markus
 
Cableguy

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lancaster said:
B4PPC would be even better if the designer allowed different screen orientation designs for portrait, landscape and square all within the same project. I must search the wish-list to see if this request already exists.

Allowing the developer to layout the form for each orientation would allow much better use of the available screen real-estate.

So now I am very happy to have the Microsoft Logo tick for a B4PPC developed application. Am I the first ??
Click to expand...

The new Beta already enables auto-adjust, but, the idea for a "Form to each screen size" is not a new one...
The problems facing this option are simple, yet difficult to overcome, without some extensive coding...

Imagine a standart form with 4 conrtols...
Then you want to create a "Square vga" version Form...
What to do? create new controls? Change the Parent of the controls?
Use the same base-form, and re-place the controls?
Most of us took the last option, with good results...but lots of code envolved in a single or multiple subs, with a few "if then else" loops.
Then we started searching for a way to automatize the procedure, resulting in the new feature of Auto-Adjust, wich is good for most of the projects, if you can use the hole screen...
But in this case...To maintain the SIP area clear of "Text input", we surely need to re-place the controls, acording to the Form size of the device(s) we are targeting....

Sorry for the long speach...my two cents, become a full euro...lol:BangHead::sign0013:
 
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