I'm proud to announce that a new version of "Managed Services for Windows Mobile" has been released today.

Bugfixes:

• The Managed Services Launcher is now completly functional. Services become started (if registered) after a reset.
• The Managed Services Manager doesn't throw an exception, of no Managed Services are registered

You can find the latest release on CodePlex here.

Did you ever need to show a Control Panel applet programmatically from your application?

Alex Yakhnin shows in his post, how this can be done very easily. See his post here.

At CTIA this year in April, Windows Mobile announced plans to port IE 6 from the desktop to the device.  The port has been completed and this version is now officially called Internet Explorer Mobile 6.

Microsoft today announced at Tech Ed Barcelona the availability of the IE Mobile 6 emulators for developers during the “Internet Explorer Mobile 6 Preview: Leveraging web technologies for fun and profit” session

The interesting stuff about this is that instead of creating a new separate version of a mobile browser, IEM6 is based on IE6 from Windows XP. This isn’t the actual version as IE8 is on the horizon, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

The main features of IEM6 are:

· Features the rendering engine from IE6 on the PC

· Fixes layout for mobile screens, like f.e. text wrapping

· Supporting Adobe Flash Lite 3.1

· Enhanced Script and AJAX support with Jscript 5.7 from IE8!

Instead of just having an “updated” mobile browser, which wouldn’t make a lot of sense compared to an Opera Mobile or Skyfire browser, IE6M also supports Touch, Gesture and multiple Zoom Levels and Panning. This brings this browser on a level with the aforementioned mobile browsers.

In contrast to other browsers IEM6 enables you to switch between a Mobile and Desktop Mode, which enables you to view the general version of a homepage, or the optimized one for mobile browsers, if supported.

Therefore a support for tabbed browsing like Opera Mobile is missing. I hope this feature is on schedule for a future version.

The main problem I actually see for this browser is, that an installable version as a CAB-File isn’t actually on the schedule. It is supposed to be delivered through a firmware upgrade from your OEM. Especially in Germany this can become very ugly, as this means you aren’t only relying on the OEM offering firmware upgrade for your device, but your provider as well, as he is the one “ordering” a new version of a particular branded firmware version for his devices. This means, getting IEM6 on your device can become very hard. Probably OEMs will ship the browser with new devices, which would make sense from a marketing perspective.

The release for IE6M is scheduled for Q3 2008, which means you shall see devices with IEM6 in the market by the end of calendar year 2008.
I’ve had the chance to preview IEM6, using the emulator that was announced today. As it isn’t available yet as a firmware for my present devices I had to check it with a device emulator image. By this performance itself can’t be measured correctly.

Opening IEM6 it presents itself at the first glimpse like the previous version:

Opening the Mainmenu presents most of the new features:

Trying youtube.com proves that it is working with IEM6:

As you see, having zoomed in, the mainmenu offers the possibility to zoom in or out via the main menu. It can be achieved through the touchscreen directly, but for supporting Windows Mobile 6 Standard Devices (Smartphones) without a touchscreen, this feature is available for those devices as well.

Testing Expedia.de, which actually failed on my Opera Mobile proved, that IEM6 works correctly here.

The options page hasn’t changed much in this version:

Conclusion

IE6M has potential for being a good mobile browser, compared to Opera or Skyfire. The advantage is that the rendering engine of IE6 is used, so that a lot of more pages get displayed correctly whereas other mobile browsers fail. Most websites for the desktop are designed and tested for IE as reflected by the following statistics - http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0. By porting IE 6 for the desktop to the device, Windows Mobile has effectively expanded the user base for the developers of these websites. IE Mobile 6 also extends the web experiences that end-users are familiar with on the desktop to the device, while giving end-users the flexibility of choosing to view mobile versions of websites if they prefer that.

On the other hand Opera is already delivered in ROMs with most of the latest devices making it unlikely that OEMs are going to upgrade ROMs for existing devices.

To become successful mobile browser MS HAS TO make a CAB-Installation available for upgrading actual devices.

You can download the Emulator Windows Mobile 6.1.4 Emulator Images here.

PDC was quite a busy time for Constanze, as she did a lot of video interviews with different Windows Mobile MVPs, including myself.

Ginny Caughey

Dr Neil Roodyn and Nick Landry

Myself

Especially a must see on Silverlight 2 for Mobile with MVP Maarten Struys, Constanze and Amit Chopra with Giorgio Sardo.

Have you ever been confused about a mail you sent from you Windows Mobile 6.1 device, which didn't arrive at your recipient and was left in you outgoing box?

Probably you have been hit by a bug in Windows Mobile 6.1, where you can find an official patch for this here.

Did you ever got into the issue, that you needed to change your device name programmatically? Simon Hart shows in this post, how it is done.

I knew it - as now library is actually available for the Windows Live Services regarding CF, someone would create sth. on that. I din't expect it to be that fast!

Alex Feinman hit the road with some articles on this topic:

Accessing Windows Live Services from Compact .NET Framework applications - Part I, Authentication

Accessing Windows Live Services from Compact .NET Framework applications - Part II, Contacts

Accessing Windows Live Services from Compact .NET Framework applications - Part III, Photos and Storage

All are a must read!!!

As mentioned earlier, there are more Sessions on Windows Mobile next week in Barcelona, than last week @ PDC in L.A.

Jason Langridge posted a short summary of available sessions at Tech-Ed Barcelona you can find here.

If you haven't had the chance to take a look at the recorded PDC session on SL2 for Windows Mobile over here, or just interested in the samples, which have been shown, then take a look on Amit's post on the shown samples.

You can find the post here.

Constanze Kratel informs us about the new Look and Feel of the WM Dev Senter on MSDN (US):

"Just in time for PDC we have made some changes to the Windows Mobile Developer Center on MSDN.

We have arranged our content around the different steps that make up Windows Mobile Application Development and have selected a range of content from different media. Here’s what it looks like:

We have also created a new section called “Windows  Mobile Buzz,” which provides you with links to our social networking profiles, like our Windows Mobile Facebook group.

You will still find all the familiar items you know from previously, such as Featured Resources, Webcasts, Blogs, and others.

It’s not only the Windows Mobile Developer Center that has changed. The Windows Mobile Team blog has a new look and feel too. Check it out:

And last, but not least, check out our new Windows Mobile Developer portal:

As always we are happy to get feedback from you about these changes!

..."

You can find the original post here.