Windows Mobile 6 SDK Released

With the announcement of Windows Mobile 6 at the Barcelona Smartphone and despite a false start on 12th February the Mobile 6 SDK is finally available for download from here.

This is the full SDK and requires Visual Studio 2005 to be installed before you can install it. Microsoft has promised a standalone emulator release although they have not given a date for the release.

They also announced that there will be an update around 1st May which should see the 'final' version of the SDK being released.

If you think you will be working with Windows Mobile 6 then you might want to check out Nathan Winters March MMMUG event. This event has Jason Langridge (Mr. Mobile in Microsoft) as a special guest. You can find out more about the event here.

MM&M UG February Meeting

The February Meeting of the Microsoft Mobility & Messaging User Group was the normal interesting and informative event. It's not just the content of the user group meeting that's informative but the ability to get a view into how other people do things. With these sorts of meetings/seminars people are more likely to be more open about issues and problems they have encountered as well as about practices they follow when confronting problems.

February's MM & M User Group meeting had two very good speakers. The first (Richard Siddaway) concentrated on Powershell and specifically how power shell interacts with Exchange. The demo of using power shell to manipulate both windows and exchange was quite impressive. From what was said it does seem clear that VBScript is going to be depreciated and cmd.exe will go the same way.

Right now, Powershell is limited in what it can do simply because it's not possible for me, sitting at my PC to connect to another machine running powershell and run commands. It IS possible to embed VBScript and batch files into powershell so in theory its possible to use VBScript and WMI as well as DOS tools such as the PS Tools which will extend the functionality of the powershell.
Goning forwards I'm certainly going to try to do more with Powershell. It will be interesting to see how it develops.

The second speaker was James Clifford and this one hour session concentrated on best practices for email security and touched on elements like Microsoft Forefront. The presentation jumped about all over the place but was a hugely enjoyable session thanks to James history and insights into both the Anti-Virus industry and Microsoft. I think the key message for this session was one of how proper planning can prevent a lot of issues with the email environment and I plan to touch on these through more email and security focused future blog articles.

Windows Mobile Emulation

At the Microsoft Messaging & Mobility User Group meeting last week, a demo of Exchange 2007 mobile messaging policies was show. Using Exchange 2007 policies it was shown how a mobile device could be remote wiped the NEXT time it tried to sync.

The really interesting thing about this demo was that it featured a mobile emulator device rather than real hardware. This caught my attention because I didn't even know Microsoft HAD such a thing as a mobile device emulator! A quick trip around Microsoft's site showed several add ins for Visual Studio but no actual device emulator download.

After some heavy use of Google I managed to find what I was after and piece it all together. Getting the mobile emulator up and running is not as simple as it could be but for anyone interested in using the mobile emulator software this is how I got it working.

1. Download the following files:

standalone_emulator_V1.exe
efp.msi
CTP_Setup_NoNetFX.msi
netsvwrap.msi

You will also need a copy of Active Sync 4.x or higher. I'm using 4.2 which is the latest and this works like a charm.

2. Install the following:

standalone_emulator_V1 - This is the actual emulator
efp.msi - EFP contains the actual images
ntssrvsrap - Contains a networking driver
ctp_setup_nonetfx - Provides an emulator manager that is required to 'cradle' the device.

3. Click on Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 MSFP Emulator Images -> Pocket PC Coldboot.

4. Configure and mess around with the pocket pc

5. To sync just launch the Device Manager (Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 MSFP Emulator Images -> Device Emulator Manager)

6. Click on the GUID for your device (you might have to mess around with this if you have both the smartphone and the pda running). Click on Actions -> Cradle

7. You can now use ActiveSync to sync with your Exchange server as long as the connection in Active Sync is set to DMA.

8. Finally, to save your settings click on File -> Save State in the emulator. This will allow you to use the savestate icon options under Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 MSFP Emulator Images.



Enjoy!

MM&M User Group Inaugural Meeting

I had the good fortune to be invited to Microsoft in London's Soho for the inaugural meeting of the MM&M UG (Microsoft Messaging & Mobility User Group UK).

This group has been created in order to encourage users in the UK to share knowledge and tips on Microsoft Messaging platforms so things it's main focus is on Exchange server.
The session I went to in London was fairly well attended for a first meeting. About 20 people showed up to see three presentations ranging from an overview of Exchange 2007 to a live demo of some of the text-to-voice capabilities of Exchange 2007.

The meeting did demonstrate that Microsoft really do 'eat their own dogfood' with Eileen Brown (Microsoft Technology Evangelist) hitting a stumbling block for a couple of minutes because the Exchange server her test account was on had been upgraded!

A couple of demos showed some nice features of Exchange 2007 - Something that's new is the ability to set policies on mobile devices so that if a mobile device is stolen it can be automatically wiped on the next sync. This wasn't demonstrated directly but we did see it in a movie file and it looked quite impressive.

Obviously, a lot of the new features in Exchange 2007 have been in other products for a while now but Exchange puts them in the right place - On the mail server where you can have all your messaging and messaging policies in one place.

The final thing that came out of the meeting was the information that Microsoft are removing support for public folders. Everything will link into SharePoint so if you have data in public folders you will need to consider going down the sharepoint route. This is something that will happen over a number of years so public folder support *MAY* be in Exchange 2007. I've not installed it yet so cannot comment on that.

Overall the meeting was quite good. If you are in the UK and heavily involved in Exchange server you could do a lot worse than register on the MM&M UG site.