The tmail.exe (i.e. the messaging application) on my Windows Mobile v6.1 is crashing all the time and it really frustrates me. The other effect was that I was not able to write to my contacts or do anything with the messaging application which left me paralyzed and it also felt as a big drop in the functionality of my Windows Mobile device. I have an ASUS P570 updated with the latest code. The repetitive crashing started happening after I was in Germany and I don’t know why, it has never stopped. Google search brought up a lot of people with similar problems and as always people had lots of advice to give. I didn’t want to do a hard reset on my device because it has a lot of data and registry settings as well as is very tightly coupled to applications on my storage card. After some searching around, I found Basel’s SMS Sender to be quite a tool but it lacks functionality like sending to multiple contacts, copy, paste of the content, etc.

I first started working with languages when I was born! Seriously, I had to learn the so called “Human Languages” to communicate with other humans, a couple of them were basically restricted to my region/country and one which is accepted universally (at least with the people I am working with). During my school days I started with another set of languages which one needed to grasp in order to communicate with a mathematical machine known as ”Computer”. In that sense, my first computer language might be Finite State Machine/Automata (FSM/FSA) which I studied in my school. Then BASIC, C, C++, Java, etc. during my graduation period. After that variants of those main languages with use of extra class libraries such as Visual Basic, Visual C++ (with MFC & ATL), ASP, JSP, JDBC, ODBC, etc. Recently I am doing more and more stuff in CSharp (C#).

Now-a-days everybody has a Multi-core environment and you are required to code threads and/or multiple processes to be scalable and fully utilize the current hardware systems. And yes, it also proves that you are a good coder and are keeping up and committed to development of multi-threaded, multi-core applications. Now, now, I am talking a bit silly since threading is a concept existing since the dawn of computing. It was pretty much explicit and you can feel the power when you code in C or C++. But when it comes to high level frameworks and languages like .NET, C#, VB.NET, etc. the simplicity of using threads might become a big problem and lead to no understanding of how things actually operate. Of course execution context is something to learn about and a good programmer should always be aware of what execution context his/her thread/process is executing in otherwise he/she would find himself/herself in a lot of problems related to thread synchronization, deadlocks, etc.

As I am working a lot with .NET these days, I was looking for some .NET obfuscators along with their license types, features, URLs, etc. I got a link to a nice URL which gives all the Info at: http://www.csharp411.com/net-obfuscators/

Enjoy & have fun computing…

I was developing a program which allows me to take a bunch of HTML files and put it into a single document. These files need to be put in as rendered in IE and the HTML code tags should not be visible. Still all the links, etc. should be along in the document so generated. Manual way to do it would be to open the HTML files one by one in Internet Explorer or any other browser, press CTRL+A, then CTRL+C, open the word document, go to End of File (EOF) and then press CTRL+V. One of the questions is the use case. Why would I need to do something like this?

Recently I had been working on a program to get a set of HTML files rendered in IE and then copy the contents from the IE window to a word document. I wanted to do this in VC++ since it provides very easy access to COM objects like IE, Word, etc. and I have also used it in the past to build BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) and like. VB also supports COM but usually has pretty complex procedures to do minor things. And I forgot about .NET and the wrapper libraries around COM objects which provides very easy access. If I want to do something like that I would better use C# instead. But as it goes, I started coding in VC++. The basic logic of the code is as follows:

I was writing a small piece of code for Windows Mobile in C# and wanted to use GetKeyboardState() but after a lot of searching around found out that the API is not available. Also Mouse Hooks does not work in Windows Mobile. As simple as this information seems, it took me a lot of time to search and basically validate that information. Of course the various ideas and blog posts out there are pretty confusing and does not allow you to reach to a conclusion easily.

Last night I watched the movie District 9 (D9) and I was positively happy to have invested my time in watching the movie. It deals with quite a lot of issues about human kind, its so called humanity and the plights of so called aliens. In one form or another it shows the fight that exists between one so called well to do community and another. When the story is applied in another context we  see the same behavior repeated across various factions of the world and society in general.