Windows Phone 7 – emulator’s shortcut

I discovered about these shortcut only today, so maybe this short post it can be useful to other devs.

When you enter a textbox in the emulator, the virtual keyboard comes up; and you can use it with your mouse. But if you need to enter text in a faster way, you can hit PageUp, and use the “real” pc keyboard.

Then you can switch back to the virtual keyboard with PageDown.

Other useful shortcut:

• F1 – corresponds to the Back button on the emulator
• F2 – the "Start" button on the emulator
• F3 – the Search button on the emulator

Windows Mobile Device Cannot Connect (or Quickly Disconnect or Drop) and Not Sync with Vista WMDC (ActiveSync)

Sometimes my Wondows Mobile phone stops syncing with the laptop, and I always go nut trying to discover the reason of this behavior.

Today while searching on Bing I found a page that shows  the solution in a very clear way, and here is the link to that:

Windows Mobile device cannot connect or quickly disconnect

Happy syncing!

i-mate k-jam reset and reinstall

Today I decided to reset completely my K-Jam, and reinstall everything.

First of all: how to reset to the "factory" settings? Well, this is the procedure: while holding the Comm manager button and the Voice Command button, push in on the soft reset button (reset hole) once. Keep holding the Comm Manager and Voice Command buttons until there is a screen asking you if you want to clear all data. To commit, press the green send key.

So now I have in my hands an "empty" k-jam... really fast, I have to say, but almost useless: no mail, no apps, nothing installed.

Ok. After the first minimal setup I went on connecting the device to my pc (running Vista). The Mobile device center shows up, and from there I configure syncing of email, contacts, agenda.

First stop: my OWA connection requires a certificate, so before I can sync I have to install the certificate on the mobile device. Ok, I go thru file system and copy the certificate somewhere, then open it on the k-jam (to install it) and ok, now I can sync mail and everything...

Now I'd like to low-level format my storage card (2Gb) because in it I have some folders and file swith funky names that WM isn't able to delete. And before I reistall al my stuff I want to clean up everything. I decided to install and use StorageTools for WM5, 100kb, from here: http://www.softwinter.com/download.html

From now on I simply reinstall my list of "preferred" software. Time needed for all this, around 2 hours.

How to backup a Blogger blog

If you want to have a backup of your Blogger-hosted blog, read this: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-backup-blogger-blog.html