Maarten Struys, a former DAD MVP, has published a whitepaper on Creating Location Aware Applications for Windows Mobile Devices.

This whitepaper doesn’t only cover GPS, but Cell Tower Lookup as well. Cell Tower Lookup is based on GSM, where a position can be retrieved by the according CellID. The pros and cons of each method are covered by the whitepaper as well. A sample application is also included.

As the sample application is using the Yahoo web service for retrieving the location based on the CellID, I’d suggest to take a look at Providers like CellDB and OpenCellID. Those providers don’t only enable (after registration) to request CellID locations, but also to upload new ones.

If you are especially interested in posting new CellIDs, than you probably shall take a look at the Open Cell Client.

I’ve been quite astonished to find out, that the Dev Toolkit for WM 6.5 doesn’t have any documentation on how to create Widgets for WM 6.5 included.

Instead of finding it within the Dev Toolkit, an article can be found under Getting started with widgets on Windows Mobile 6.5 on MSDN. This article is supposed to be a starting point of an article series, as the information provided isn’t fully covered. Topics around the included Widget API are missing.

A small remark on the article: If you have already installed the Dev Toolkit instead of the WM 6.5 Emulator package, the description on how to use the emulator isn’t correct.

Instead of using this entry:

you have to use one of the Windows Mobile 6.5 Emulators, listed under the Windows Mobile 6 Professional / Standard SDK entry.

Yep – it is available now: The Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Toolkit.

Developer Toolkit means that it isn’t a full blown SDK and therefore needs the Windows Mobile 6.0 SDK as a base installed.

The Toolkit includes the Windows Mobile 6.5 Emulator and is available in 7 languages (yes, already german!!!!).

You can find a brief description on the Toolkit here, or just go ahead and download it from here.

Ever wanted to write your blog posts from your Windows Mobile device? As there are a lot of mobile twitter apps the applications for mobile blogging are rare.

Therefore you shall take a look at Windows Live Writer for Windows Mobile, which I now take as a working name.

The name itself states that it is an application from Microsofts Windows Live Team, which ISN’T true. It isn’t associated with Microsoft in ANY way, so expect the application name to change soon.

The application itself, as published on Codeplex here, looks very promising for the moment as it has started a few days ago.

The UI isn’t anything extraordinary at the moment: Plain Windows Forms controls. In my eyes this isn’t anything bad as it goes down to the basics and just serves the needs.

Looks promising – let’s see what happens in the future with this tool!

I get questioned a lot of times, where to find new or different mobile controls from third partys.

First of all I’d like to point you to Resco.net. With the MobileForms Toolkit you get new forms, which are enhanced in touch functionality.

A list of all included controls including screenshots can be seen here. The toolkit itself is compatible with VS 2008 as well.

A smaller set of interesting UI components can be found at http://www.beemobile4.net/.

As it looks like this company is just starting, the included elements look promising. Especially the offer of suggesting new elements looks promising.

But what do you do, if you want to create your own alphablended or transparent controls?

In this case you shall have a look at Alex Yakhnins post to see, how the basics work.

If you aren’t interested in creating evereything from scratch, you are probably interested in taking a look at the AlphaMobileControls on CodePlex.

These available base elements can be used for developing more compelling controls, if needed.

The AlphaMobileControls have been shortly covered in our WebCast Series as well (unfortunatly in german only):

Windows Mobile für Profis (Teil 3 von 6) - Wege zu ansprechenden Benutzeroberflächen unter Windows Mobile: Alphablending, gradiente Farbverläufe und Transparenz