Mar 12

Building Windows Mobile application with Visual Studio

I am still working on this Windows Mobile application.  I am in the polishing stage now.  It has been a challenaging project becuase of having to learn about SQLCE, Windows Mobile, wireless printing (which Windows Mobile does not support natively).  One of my biggest frustrations was the Visual Studio build was getting longer and longer.  It seemed the more I added the slower it got, but shutting down Visual Studio also helped.  I could not find anything anywhere that described this problem or anyone else that had the same problem.  Until yesterday I found VS2008 Windows Mobile 5 Project very slow to compile on a MSDN form.  Yes, I have tried 2005 & 2008 version and they both act the same.  The builds where taking 30 minutes. It got to the point that I started developing this application as a Windows application and the builds would take only a couple of minutes.  This was fine until I got to the point of really testing the application using a mobile device, so I had to convert the project back.  Believe me the 30 minute build only last a couple of days until I found a new way to build my project.  It is not so new but different, because I am using MSBuild to do my compiling and taking only 2 minutes to compile.  After the build I still use F5 to build the project and run, but now there is nothing to build so VS starts the deploy and I am a happy man!!!  There is one BIG downfall to this approach, forgetting to use MSBuild to do the compiling and pressing F5.  It does allow me to write this article though!!!! Here is my solution to slow builds in VS:
  1. Open a VS 2008 command prompt (this is not a normal command prompt, it is a short cut by the VS short cut in the Start | Program | .. menu) ( this only needs to be done once)
  2. Save all changes (Ctrl-Shift-S)
  3. At the command prompt type MSBuild <path\filename of your VS project> (drag the file from Explorer) & press enter
  4. Wait for build to complete
  5. Run (F5) your VS project
Hope that saves a few hairs.
Mar 05

Bloglines

I read my feeds with Bloglines (yes, I have tried Google Reader ), because I like to read all the enteries from a subscription at one time.  It is that simple.  OK, there is one more thing "s".  The shortcut key for bloglines uses "s" to navigate next which on the left side of the keyboard means I can leave my right hand on the mouse if it is already there.

The new beta look is looking very nice and have changed some of there wording (Keep/Pinned). So far so good, keep up the good work. I did notice that the counts are not geeting updated in the new beta but I can live with that.  

Update:  the counts are being updated but now I have to mark each as being read, yes there is a user setting to mark them all as being read but that does not seem to be working.

Old Bloglines
New Bloglines