I have made an asp.net application designed to manage and optimize warehouse statistics info. The user had to collect and enter all the info manually so I thought it would be way better to get use of some bar code devices that uses bluetooth for communications to get that info on an automated process.
So I developed an Internet explorer extension that managed the page requests for the bluetooth device and made posts inside a control container with the data.
The fact is that this extension gives me plenty of problems, having to redo the pairing of the devices every now and then as it looses it's functionality after some unknown event. I don't know if it has to do with windows updates or accounts management and rights.
Does anyone knows an alternative, that would be more stable? Perhaps with Java?
Cross-browser would be a plus. In fact I'm headed at mobile devices using android. For the moment, only windows tablets are compatible.
Thanks.
if you are targeting windows tablets, why not using HTML5+Phonegap. This might help.
http://phonegap.com/blog/2012/10/30/announcing-apache-cordova-support-for-windows-phone-8/
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ASP.NET Form. If running a form in a browser on a small (Android) device with a barcode scanner, will the scanned barcode go into the ASP.NET textbox? Or I need to add something to the application?
Well, it going to depend on which of the 150+ barcode scanners you decide to grab from google play.
However, the answer is yes, or no. It will depend on the kind of scanner.
If you download just a scanning application (software based - not built in scanner).
The reason is Android (and even iOS) don't allow one application to set focus, get/grab/take data from other applications. Nor is the reverse allowed. If that was possible, then the app could also get/grab/take values from when you are say running your on-line banking application.
I don't think Android thus supports focus to another application during scan that has focus. Now if this is factory supplied software on the phone? Then yes, this works like a desktop keyboard "wedge". That means the program does not know if you are typing from keyboard, or input is from the scanner (hence the name keyboard wedge). These will work with a web form.
However, we now seeing the rise of software based keyboard wedges. That means the software scanner is installed on android as a custom keyboard. And this in case, then once again, it will work in a web form.
So, for devices with a built in scanner? yes, that will work in all applications. For a software only (uses built in camera), then again, this is possible if the software in question works as a keyboard/wedge scanner.
If you going to adopt android scanning? then use a purpose built Android scanner.
And another possible if you want to use a software scanner? Write a small android application and have it talk to your web site. This I think is the best solution, but of course means you have to adopt some Android dev tools.
So how this works will depend on if the android device has a built in scanner, or it is a software + camera based scanner. However, it would seem that even now installable software based scanners in theory can be made to work for any application since the application is running and behaving as a user installed keyboard.
So, you have to check the particular device. The answer is not in all cases, and the answer depends on if you using a Android device with a built in scanner, or you looking to use any Android phone as that scanner.
Ok, so I have a Flex application developed using Apache FB 4.14 SDK. I got it working and approved on App Store and Play Store. Now my client is looking to port the app on Windows Phone. I tried some googling but all I found is about Astoria project, which is recently dropped by Microsoft. So My question from you folks is what is the best way to port the Flex code for Windows phone with minimal efforts?
Sadly, there is currently no easy path from Flex to Windows Phone.
The road map also states no current plans to add support: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/whitepapers/roadmap.html
You will have to port your game to a different engine. How much work that is, and which engine you should use, depends a lot on the nature of your app.
It also depends on if you want to make a Windows code base just for that platform, or if you want to port to something to have one code base for all mobile platforms
I have a .NET WinForms app wherein the laptop is connected to both a scale and an GPS antenna via USB. Is it crazy to think we could have this instead as a web app and on a tablet? We're looking to make things thinner and smaller (this goes in a truck.. driver doesn't need bulk of keyboard either).
Obviously the tablet would have to have a USB port (some do, some don't). But then for "stickiness" to USB devices, I'd have to have, what, a Silverlight control on an ASP.NET page? More trouble than its worth?
Thanks for any thoughts/advice.
You could write an ActiveX control or browser plugin to use the USB port (Silverlight might not be able to do what you need). Unfortunately these controls most probably will have to be installed on the machine manually (unless you want to lower security settings for the browser). You might be better off using ClickOnce with your WinForms application to simplify deployment of new versions and keep using your existing codebase.
If all you need is to read the GPS data, you should use HTML5 Geolocation API: Demo and Specification
I have connected USB barcode scanners to iPads through the USB to 30-Pin adapter with great luck. The only trouble is there is a power limitation, if the device draws more than a couple hundred milliamps the iPad will shut of the power to the device. You might have trouble hooking up peripherals that are not acting like a keyboard or a camera though.
I have no up to date mobile phone personally, and we don't have any in our team to allow us to test mobile versions of our ASP.Net websites.
We have now been asked to provide a mobile version of our website (which is a fairly busy site) but I have no means to check the mobile pages.
Any suggestions? Are there emulators or would it better to have the real thing?
It's always better to have the real thing, but if that's not an option, I have used a plugin for FireFox called "User Agent Switcher"
Another route you could go is to get the Android SDK and load up an emulator. It runs a full version of android, so you could open the browser from there (You could also change screen size/device type) - a little more heavy than the first solution, but potentially another route worth exploring.
You can use simulators/emulators - Android, iPhone etc.
Well Apple provide an iOS emulator, which you can download in the developers section of Apple's own website.
Outside of that, the only other testing environment I'm aware of is Ripple, which is a plugin for Chrome, designed to emulate a range of mobile devices. You can find that at: http://ripple.tinyhippos.com/.
As others have answered there is a lot of different tools to do the testing and that is all fine to a certain extent, for daily testing by developers and testers.
But with 15 years of testing behind me I would never let the site go untested with a few different real devices if the site is an important service - usually this can be done with "staff" phones at no cost if the cost is the problem. I would more or less say; can your company live with publishing a site out there and there might be a risk it won't work on some mobile platforms?
DeviceAnywhere is the tool that we have used a lot. It provides you access to numerous mobile devices using which you can test both apps and websites. They have placed several physical devices which you can see and operate remotely.
It is always better to test on real devices instead of emulators. During development phase, emulators are helpful but for final delivery it is best to test on real phones. Mobile web browsers may or may not support HTML,CSS,JS completely and their individual implementation could be different.
Does anyone know of a commercial or free .NET CF library/component/api that I can use within my Windows Mobile 6 and .NET CF 3.5 application?
I need to: enumerate the list of available WiFi networks in range, connect and disconnect specific SSIDs/networks in the list, and manage switching between SSIDs programatically (e.g. I'm currently connected to "public1" and want to switch to "public2" to do some stuff, and then switch back to "public1").
I have tried the OpenNETCF library for this and it somewhat works, but it's crashing quite often with Native Exceptions, which I can't handle with a catch() in my C# code so they bubble up to the end user and they get a nasty windows crash screen with the "send" and "don't send" buttons.
OpenNETCF forums seem to be dead, with lots of posts but no replies to most of them, and the last release from those guys was way back in March 2009.
Last I remember the OpenNETCF code was decent and worked without any issues on a number of devices I tried it on. I certainly don't remember getting native exceptions from it.
Is it possible that you're working on a customised platform? It is possible that the real issue might be due to modifications made to your particular device / operating system.
IIRC we eventually switched to Summit cards for hardware or cost reasons which uses a different API but obviously an API that would only work with Summit cards.
I'm afraid I don't know of any other alternatives atm. Sorry. :(