I got an i-mate Smartphone2 (running Windows Smartphone 2003 OS) on the week-end. Thus far I am very pleased with it. It took me about 20 minutes to have “hello world” running on it using VS 2005 beta 1 (in spite of a few crazy VS problems I have been having, see below). I have used Dominic’s before a couple of times and was pretty happy with the “feel“ of it. Now I just need to think of some cool smartphone apps to write.
OK, now for some crazy dangerous file copying - My “play” laptop has had every beta version of whidbey installed on it, not to mention tons of other developer betas of different things. I am resigned to the fact that it will need to be re-built soon, as I am encountering many strange problems (like sn.exe not working). One problem that was particularly annoying was that in a number of cases compiling assemblies of certain sorts was failing under framework 2.0. This manifested it’s self in many forms from XML Serialization problems (not the usual kind), failure to compile executables, and inability to view VS 2005 help (once again, not in the “usual” way). In each instance I got a strange error message that “c:<some long path here depending on the thing I am doing>\CSCNN.tmp is not a valid Win32 resource”. It turned out there was an old version of msvcr80.dll hanging around in a sub-directory of the C:\WINDOWS\WinSxS\ folder. Since my machine was/is probably going to be rebuilt soon anyway (especially if I keep doing things like this regularly) I copied the versions from the latest 2.0 framework folder I had, which fixed my problem. Next time I might try the safer option, and try the “repair” first in VS 2005. Either way I think I will be rebuilding my machine fairly soon.
Recently I’ve also been trying to improve my CSS skills. I found the CSS Zen Garden a great resource for design ideas, as well as cool CSS tricks.
http://csszengarden.coret.org/