Testing Tools, Resources, and more...
I’m really itching to do a series of posts on slaying the Virtual Memory monster… you know, that memory issue that is largely misunderstood and you hope you never deal with. On the same note, I figure it’s time to lighten up a bit and mention some tidbits of information that I’m pretty excited about. Every developer should have these on their radar:
One of the common requests we get in the Windows Mobile space is for more testing tools -- to help identify stability, performance, and memory problems. We need tools! Application Verifier finally trickled out for WM developers last year, but it didn’t help with managed apps. Well now, our NETCF team has done some amazing work with Remote Performance Monitor (man, I love these guys). The latest versions (SP2 and beyond) to provide a way to dump a tree of the managed heap to see exactly where all your memory is going. This is an incredibly useful tool to help identify memory leaks and excessive memory use. Hopper is also getting a lot of traction with online and community resources to teach developers how to take full advantage of its features. There are a lot of gold nuggets on the new Hopper blog to help stabilize your application on Windows Mobile and make the most of our tools. If you haven’t taken a look at these resources you have to check these out!
HoppeRx - the cure for your ailing device
https://blogs.msdn.com/hoppeRx/
Remote Performance Monitor & NETCF Performance Resources
https://blogs.msdn.com/davidklinems/archive/category/11128.aspx
“How Do I?” – a series of “how to” videos by mobile guru and all-around awesome dude, Jim Wilson. Don’t get me wrong, whitepapers are great – but isn’t it nice to get the video demo and have the code available for download?
https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/bb495180.aspx
Books!
MSDN and the mobile online community do a great job of covering most of information you need to know, but sometimes you find that good book that you can always lean on to fill those information gaps. I always used to recommend two books to developers getting into Windows Mobile development. One was Doug Boling’s Programming Microsoft Windows CE.Net and the other was the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework Core Reference. Unfortunately, both of these are beginning to get a bit dated (Doug has a newer CE 6.0 book, but WM is still all CE 5.x based), but they did a great job of covering a breadth of mobile concepts that I didn’t often find in other books.
MSPress just released a new resource that I’m pretty excited about that covers a huge expanse of mobile developer topics, simply called-- Microsoft® Mobile Development Handbook. You will notice the authors are some of our mobile community superstars (Andy Wigley, Daniel Moth, and Peter Foot). I’m still reading through it, but if it manages to live up to my expectations, it’s going to be a “must have” on my list.
https://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/10294.aspx
-Reed