Well, I have decided to do some development with Windows Mobile (or Windows Phone as Microsoft seem to be wanting to call it now) as it seems to need some love in the applications arena. Also it will be nice to see what Microsoft offer up against the competition with Apple, Google and Symbian. The application I will be building will be nothing ground breaking/earth shattering/world dominating, just a little Twitter application called TwittTwoo! Probably not an original name, but that can change and I am terrible at naming things (the server is called ZeroGravitas). So there should be a good amount of swearing and pleading in the near future, which is good 
The only thing I am lacking is a physical Windows Phone to play around on, which is a shame, but at the same time I am still all loved up with my Nokia E71. It’s like a Blackberry but less infuriating and a slightly more appealing user interface.
One thing I am not loved up on is Nokia’s Software. It’s clunky, slow and to be honest just shit. My best example is the Nokia Pc Internet Access application used to tether my laptop to the internet whilst I am on the train. Mostly it’s an opportunity to generate more white noise before I have to get back on the bike to work again, however the application seems to not be able to cope with disconnection.
High Resolution Image Fail
Say I move closer to another mast and switch over and for some reason the connection drops, or I go though a tunnel or an enclosed area where packet data transmission isn’t available. Fair enough, I don’t expect a fantastic and constant internet connection (You are an idiot if you do). I do however, expect either the application or the phone to re-establish a connection to the internet at the earliest opportunity. It is rather tedious to bring the application back up from Windows 7’s hide-everything-except-network-and-sound notification area and click connect, wait and see if it works, then click connect ‘n’ times till it finally establishes a connection. I wonder if there is a workaround, perhaps one that doesn’t involve Nokia software.
Now if anyone reads this blog, I mentioned about a month ago about the wonderful error message that is given out by IIS when using the Castle Project’s Dynamic Proxy in conjunction with NHibernate.
Failed creating a proxy instance
with an inner exception of:
Illegal operation attempted on a registry key marked for deletion
This is thrown when the compiler is attempting to compile the proxy instances for use with NHibernate and fails rather spectacularly, requiring a full server reboot to convince IIS to start serving pages from that site. Anyway a workaround seems to be to generate the proxy instances into a new assembly when deploying your new shiny ASP.NET site to IIS with a tweaked NHibernate setting in the web config to force it to use static proxy instances.
It’s not an ideal solution, however it should circumvent the problem where the compiler throws the rattle out of the pram when creating proxy instances for NHibernate. The other problem was that we found that the utility only works for NHibernate 2 and not 2.1 (or 2.2 if I recall correctly) so a solution was hacked together a utility to generate the instances for the version of NHibernate that we are using in production and annoyingly it requires an open database connection.
If anyone is interested, I can point them in the right direction.
Anyway, I shall be enjoying the delights of Eddie Izzard this time tomorrow evening. It will be simply fantastic!
Tags: Castle Project, Development, E71, Eddie Izzard, IIS, NHibernate, Nokia Fail, Proxy Instances, Silly Naming, TwittTwoo!, Windows Phone