I am taking a much more active look at the mobile\smart phone scene. I have been very happy with the quality of service provided by Alltel, however, I purchased the cheapest phone  I could at the time (text is painful, no camera, no IM, no blue tooth) and so I am way behind the technology curve. Our contract is up soon and we are eager to get a much better phone. I am eyeing the HTC Touch which seems to provide all the cool things I need with the exception of WiFi, apparently they dropped WiFi when they converted it from a GSM to CDMA model ;(

As this is a Windows Mobile Device I should be able to upgrade to the newest version (6.1) which was announced officially today. The main update that I am interested in seeing is the full Silverlight support which I saw a brief demo of during this years Mix.

According to the press release Microsoft has updated IE Mobile to support Adobe's Flash and H.264 streaming, which will make it possible for Windows Mobile devices to act more like regular browsers (iPhone nailed this concept out the gates). WM 6.1 will also make it easier to view full screen Web pages.

I understand nothing is really free, and in fact the cost of this Java runtime update would probably be staggering in terms of total man hours to produce. I am forced to wonder how much Google pay Sun to bootstrap an additional installation into the process? what is that cost?

I love the irony of an installation that has a popup screen that I cannot stop, advertising its own ability to 'Block annoying pop-up ads' ;)

I was happily creating my application when I realized that I need to start thinking (at least in theory) about the installation package that would be needed. After a disappointing search within the Visual Studio 2008 Express templates, I remembered about the ClickOnce concept I had heard about many moons ago. This particular method of deployment allows for rapid deployment of applications via a simple url.

Code access security is a mechanism in the .NET Framework that helps limit the access that code has to sensitive or protected resources. It makes a lot of sense to configure the code access security permissions for your ClickOnce application to include the permissions that your application needs. This type of security conscious programming allows people using your software to know precisely what it can and cannot access.

I was checking out some Podcasts at the Zune Marketplace, when I realized that I seemed to be missing all the Videocasts from the Ricky Gervais Podcast. Upon further investigation I noticed that the Zune Player seems to get confused when handling feeds with mixed content (audio and video), even though RSS specifications clearly indicate that this is feasible.

In the CommonRSS application I am creating I started looking at using the Microsoft Feeds API. This API will allow me to check whether any new feeds are available within the Windows RSS platform.

using Microsoft.Feeds.Interop;

public static int TotalUnreadItemCount()
{
    try
    {
        FeedsManager fm = new FeedsManager();
        IFeedFolder rootfolder = (IFeedFolder)fm.RootFolder; 

        return rootfolder.TotalUnreadItemCount;
    }
    catch
    {
        return 0;
    }
}

I was working on some code that would provide a means to quickly tell if the application that you are starting is actually already running, actually it was for the CommonRSS application that I am working. I have done similar things in Visual Basic 6 but I do not remember ever trying this in C#. I am wondering if there is a much cleaner way of doing this ... any thoughts?

using System.Diagnostics;

private const string APPLICATION_NAME = "CommonRSS";

public static bool IsAppAlreadyRunning
{
    get
    {
        bool isAlreadyRunning = false;
        Process currentProcess = Process.GetCurrentProcess();
        Process[] processes = Process.GetProcesses();
        foreach (Process process in processes)
        {
            if (currentProcess.Id != process.Id)
            {
                if (APPLICATION_NAME == process.ProcessName)
                {
                    isAlreadyRunning = true;
                    break;
                }
            }
        }
        return isAlreadyRunning;
    }
}