Managed library / component / api for Windows Mobile WiFi management and control? - networking

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. :(

Related

Alternative Java applet network drive access

Chrome is on the verge of definitly break compatability with NPAPI, and IE breaking with ActiveX the future of Java Applets is dark. Currenty we actively use a secure applet for out client organizations that enables their users to upload a bunch of files from their file system to our servers with the click of a button. The applet has full access to any configured drive, including network drives.
With the imminent death of the applet this functionality is going to be lost if we don't find an alternative. I have already tried to explore different solutions, including the chrome FileSystem API but that is currently only available for Chrome (http://caniuse.com/#feat=filesystem) and has limited access.
Does anybody know about an alternative to keep supporting the much appreciated functionality? Unfortunately we are obligated to support all browser down to IE8.
I've written a post about this here.
Once Google Chrome was the first to announce that they won’t be supporting NPAPI anymore, they were also the first to provide a new architecture in order to rewrite your code to work on their browser. You can take a look on Native Messaging, which “can exchange messages with native applications using an API that is similar to the other message passing APIs”. The problem is that this approach only works on Chrome, is not something that you can adapt to other browsers.
A more useful approach is FireBreath, a browser plugin in a post NPAPI world. Check the words below from one buddy of the project:
“FireBreath 2 will allow you to write a plugin that works in NPAPI, ActiveX, or through Native Messaging; it’s getting close to ready to go into beta. It doesn’t have any kind of real drawing support, but would work for what you describe. The install process is a bit of a pain, but it works. The FireWyrm protocol that the native messaging component uses could be used with any connection that allows passing text data; it should be possible to make it work with js-ctypes on firefox or plausibly WEB-RTC or even CORS AJAX in some way. For now the only thing we needed to solve was Chrome, but we did it in a way that should be pretty portable to other technologies.”
In light of the answer provided by Uly Marins I have researched the options suggested. Unfortunately these options weren't viable for our application, because the mayority of our users do not have sufficient rights to install third party plugins. Additionally the API is still in Beta which won't do any good in a stable production environment.
The main problem we wanted to solve was the abbility to delete files from the accessed folders. It seemed like one of the mayor goals of the removal of the NPAPI support was exactly to prevent this kind of possibility. Therefore we needed to reduce our goals to a simple solution that was still acceptable for our users, with the additional training on how to clear the selected folder manually (because most of our users are almost computer illiterate and needed to access network folders).
Long answer short. The requested solution is just not possible anymore and had to be replaced by a simpler solution and additional training.

Is WWW available on all platforms that Unity supports?

Somewhat related to this question I just asked, but I know it isn't good to have multiple questions in one, so making a separate question.
I know Licenses Comparison shows that it is available on all versions (even free) of Unity on all platforms in that list. However, I've found other mistakes/misleading info in that list, so I'd rather hear from someone with experience or someone from Unity.
Also, if I do end up using WWW, I'd need to use a long-polling design (where server waits several seconds, even minutes to reply). Any issues I'll run in to on different platforms?
Main platforms I know I need to target: Windows Store 8 (Surface RT), iOS, Android -- tablets and phones -- probably desktops later (Windows and Mac)
WWW reference
EDIT: I'll be using HTTP and HTTPS in case not obvious (not file: or ftp: protocols).
I have used the WWW-class on PC standalone and Android builds. It worked well with both text and textures. Only platform that requires additional tweaking, that I know of, is the web player where you have to add crossdomain-settings for fetching files.

Web page to access bluetooth device

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/

Flex application suspended while in the background using Safari on Mac

Users of my Flex application report that sometimes the application is freezed when the browser window is minimized or they select another active tab over it. In this suspended state, the application receives no CPU share and all network connections it uses are closed. When the browser window is restored, the application is resumed. This happened with Safari 5 on Mac OS Leopard, with both Flash player 10.0 and 10.1. I searched a lot but I could not find any information about such behavior.
This behavior is not reproducible on each Mac with Safari, so my questions are:
Under which circumstances this may happen?
Is it possible entering in suspended state to be prevented and how?
Is it possible for the Flex application to be notified about going into sleep mode and wake up back?
This is a Safari thing and is by design. Newer versions of Safari suspend flash content that is not in the foreground tab (not sure when this started, version 4?) For instance, if you have multiple tabs open, each with a youtube video playing and you go back and forth between the tabs, only one of the videos will be playing at a time. To answer your specific questions:
This will happen to any flash content that is in a background tab (not sure about the minimized state.)
Not aware of a means of disabling this behavior.
You may want to dig around in the Safari documentation to see if there is some sort of JavaScript event that you can grab onto, but I don't think you are likely to have success there.
Good luck.
Are your users using Flash Player 10.1 ? As part of the performance improvements in 10.1; I believe an application in a minimized state will get throttled in order to use less system resources / battery power.
I don't think there is any way to prevent this; and no APIs exposed that relate to this.
Other people I've spoken to have had issues with using local connections between minimized apps and active apps. I'd bet there is already a bug in the bug base on that.
Wrt the following above:
.I don't think there is any way to prevent this; and no APIs exposed that relate to this.
You may want to check out if Silverline from Librato can help you control how much and which applications get what system resources (CPU, memory, Disk and Network IO) with dynamic control based on application demand. If the above issue is a feature of flash - then obviously it may not help. But if you are trying to say run multiple applications / processes and would like to control who gets how much system resources (dynamically) then you could try Silverline - it does not require any changes to OS or app. http://silverline.librato.com

Alternatives to Live/GamerServices for XNA projects?

Using the GamerServices component for XNA to access Xbox/GfW Live for networking purposes requires developers and players each to have a US$100/year subscription to Microsoft's Creators Club. That's not much of an issue for Xbox360 XNA projects as you need the subscription anyway to be able to put your game on the 360.
But for PC games using XNA, requiring developers and players to put that much up each year is pretty crazy just for the access to a player's gamer card. Are there any solutions for XNA games that provide similar benefits to GamerServices? Or are developers pretty much restricted to building their own networking functionality if they don't want to subject their players (and themselves) to that $100/head hit?
Perhaps you could try Lidgren
Please note that games for windows live is now free:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/22/games-for-windows-live-now-free/
Since using the Live APIs is your only option on xbox and zune, it makes it a pretty compelling option since your only issue was the cost on windows :-) Especially considering the fact that once game studio 3.0 launches, you'll be able to sell your games on xbox live's new community games section
Edit, upon further investigation, it turns out that the games for windows live stuff is kind of half-baked. The gamerservices library doesn't seem to be included in the redistributable bits. So unless you want to break the EULA, your player would have to install gamestudio. That being said, I do still believe that it's free nonetheless, if not inconvenient.
Well, you can use sockets, obviously, and using sockets you can create a seperate, dedicated server app, which you can't do with Live (as far as I know). You could also try SteamWorks; I haven't heard of anyone trying that, however.

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