Windows Phone 7 – how to reset emulator

Oct 26, 2010 by Inteist

I needed recently to basically remove my app installation from the Windows Phone 7 emulator. I could not find how you can remove the app from the emulator, but I found a way to reset and force the Windows Phone 7 emulator to cold boot.

You can clear the windows phone emulator state, by deleting the saved state file in:

%ProgramData%\Microsoft\XDE\*.dess

You can just hit the windows key on your keyboard and paste this “%ProgramData%\Microsoft\XDE\” and you will be taken to the right location.

Delete the *.dess files. This will force the emulator to reset and run the cold boot sequence.

Too bad, it’s not possible to do simulator reset right from the development tools. Here’s hoping that Windows Phone Tools development team will improve that situation in the future releases.

Please share your thought in comments.

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BlackBerry Developer Conference 2010 is tomorrow

Sep 27, 2010 by Inteist

BlackBerry Developer conference is starting tomorrow. I have arrived to San Francisco at noon today and just had a relaxing day browsing the sity, visiting the beautiful Chinatown and the Coit Tower from where you can see pretty much the whole city. It’s my second time in San Francisco, first time being here about 1.5 years ago for the Google I/O 2009 (so sorry had to miss it this year…). San Francisco is an interesting city and I like it, but it is a little dirty for my snobby Bostonian taste.

Anyhow, this is not about the city. BBDevCon 2010 is tomorrow and I am expecting it to be a turnkey for me, it was a long time of love and hate relation between me and BlackBerry. The platform is not evolving (yeah yeah, BB OS 6 – whatever… this is so 3 years ago) and in the super fast paced space as mobile, standing still is actually equals to moving back as everyone is innovating with the speed of light.

I will be looking for cues as to whether RIM will be able to at least maintain its current user base and improve his ways in treating smaller indie developers.

There have been rummors about BB Tablet – BlackPad, to be announced during the BB DevCon 2010. I am personally very skeptical about it, but we will see. Also – it is almost clear to everyone that RIM will announce it’s advertising API availability to the public – not great news though. They have the worst performing advertising so far, and this is one of the major points for me personally, if there is no promising (I am not even wishing for bright) future on the horizon, BlackBerry will be the last platform to receive any attention on my list.

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Is RIM going down?

Sep 20, 2010 by Inteist

For the last several month I’ve been thinking about the future of developing for BlackBerry and whether it even makes sense to bet on the BlackBerry OS. The learning curve for BlackBerry development is very steep, which makes it a huge hurdle for the newcomers to the platform, but works for the advantage of the companies and developers who already took the plunge and were swimming the quirky waters of BlackBerry OS for some time.

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Load cod file to BlackBerry using JavaLoader

Sep 5, 2010 by Inteist

It is simple to load a BlackBerry application packaged as cod file to your device using JavaLoader.exe. With JavaLoader, you do not have to install the desktop manager if you just want to have an ability to quickly load applications to your blackberry

1. Connect your BlackBerry to your computer through USB
2. Open command prompt and navigate to the location of JavaLoader.exe
3. Run “JavaLoader.exe -u=USB load path_to_your_cod_file” command and you should be all set

It is easier if you have the JavaLoader and the COD files in the same dir because then the command is simply

JavaLoader.exe -u=USB load path_to_your_cod_file

UPDATE: The JavaLoader command will not work if you don’t have the BlackBerry desktop manager installed. You will get an error that the port can not be open.

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Motorola Droid driver for Windows 7 64 bit

May 23, 2010 by Inteist

I’ve got the Motorola Droid from Google through their device seeding program a while ago. Which is nice although Nexus One would be much better since then I would have been actually using as my phone. The Droid has to be tied to Verizon and I am a T-Mobile lad all the way.

Anyways, I’ve tried a few times to get adb debugging talk to my Droid on my Win7 64 bit and I could not get it to work for a long long time. I tried to search around for the solution, but none of the drivers that I’ve found worked until today I started the search again and found the Win7 64 bit Droid drivers from Motorola here which worked perfectly fine!

Don’t forget to go to “Settings->Applications->Development” and enable “USB Debugging”

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BlackBerry Eclipse plugin 1.1 will fix some of the annoying problems

Mar 29, 2010 by Inteist

The next version of the BlackBerry Eclipse plugin will fix most of the annoying things about blackberry development.

Some of the most important things are:

1) No need to restart emulator for new build to be loaded to the emulator (Hallelujah!!!)

The new build should be just loaded onto the already started simulator, pretty much as on Android and iPhone.

2) Ability to add external libraries i.e. *.jar files to the project

This is actually pretty peculiar since RIM was pushing hard 3-d party (external library) integration as one of important concepts and obviously it would be very beneficial for the BlackBerry ecosystem but if you did not want to use JDE, there was pretty much no clean way to add external library. That is until the 1.1 plugin comes out from beta, or at least that what was promised at the New England BlackBerry developers meetup.

3) The BlackBerry plugin would follow the “Eclipse way”

The 1.1 plugin is very different from previous version. Instead of following the “JDE way” it will be much more the natural “Eclipse way”. This is both good and bad. This is very good for developers that have experience with Eclipse and just now start to develop for BlackBerry. This will however be somewhat painful for the seasoned developers who got used to the old plugin and will need to discover many things from scratch. (I personally felt quite lost with the new 1.1 plugin and decided to stick with the old one until 1.1 comes out of beta).

You can download the beta of 1.1 from here (you would need to have BlackBerry developer account which is free and can be obtained with simple sign up immediately)

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