Database Users

Run WinMo Apps?

I am wondering if there is any type of library or environment where I could run a program written exclusively for WinMo 6. I can't post the app here due to copyright issues, but is this possible?

It seems you need something similar to wine for linux, i'm just thinking why do that with all the android apps we have

I can think of lots of programs that are not available for the android. I don't think the android has a large enough base for many outfits to utilize the wonderful potential of the android. For now the vast number of apps to me are cute little things operating in a insular little bubble.
Hope things change but for now I keep my HTC Wmo phone around
Regards, PK

ezangrando said:
It seems you need something similar to wine for linux, i'm just thinking why do that with all the android apps we have
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Oziexplorer, there's nothing so powerful for off road navigation in android.

No. You cannot.
Android = Dalvik/Java
Winmobile = C/C++ and/or DotNet
Pretty much all of the significant apps have been made from scratch for android. If you want a specific app, the best way to go about it is to bug the developer of that app. It is a good guess that they may be already working on a version for android and/or thinking about it. Your request might be the only thing they need.

Android Rom development (fixing video camera, etc.)

First of all, lots of respect to the devs for all the work they have done so far. The last few weeks we've gone from almost nothing to one of the most complete android ports of all windows devices.
Now for the topic: I'm a (beginning) software developer and after a lot of development on the .net framework I started learning java last year, at university.
I was wondering what parts of android are actually written in java. I know that the linux kernel and stuff is written in low-level languages like C(++) or even assembler. On top of that, Android runs a java virtual machine (called drupal if I remember correctly).
Does the built-in software, like for example the standard camera software, run in java, or has it been written in low-level languages to improve speed? If it has been written in Java, can we actually edit that code from the roms that are commonly used?
If so, I think there are a lot of people that could look at stuff like fixing the video camera (by changing the button layout in that mode for example) and other small bugs that occur on higher software levels. I think there are a lot of people that know nothing about kernel development but do know stuff about java (or similar OO-languages like C#) that could help out with stuff like this.
Am I on to something here? Any people that can tell me more about this?

i dont relly know
up up !!

in XTarantula's ROM the Stock Video Camera works with sound.
his build is based on Android 2.1 (Eclair) update 1.
Model Number is Nexus One and is fully stock (even with Stock Launcher, no launcher pro preinstalled.)
its a great build, im just waiting for a Froyo Build with the same features.

hope this will help: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/ui-events.html

WebKit browser for Windows Phone 8

Before we get caught up in the debate about whether Trident or WebKit is a better layout engine, I want to note that this is irrelevant in this discussion.
The majority of mobile operating systems (eg. iOS, Android, BlackBerry OS, whatever) uses WebKit. This means that there will be some mobile sites that render poorly on Trident regardless of how modern or standard compliant (or not) Trident is.
Of cause up until now, Windows Phone users have been limited to using Trident, but since Microsoft has recently announced that it added native code for development to Windows Phone 8, does this open the ability of porting WebKit browsers and other WebKit components to Windows Phone?

It depends on which libraries WebKit uses for actual graphics output. But given that GDI and DirectX would be where it's at for Windows on the Desktop and that there are differnt UI toolkits on Mac, Linux and Android I guess a lot of the code should be portable to Windows RT and by extension to WP8.
The same should be true for Mozilla's Gecko Engine.
So from my understandig of how things work it should be possible to actually port the existing code instead of having to reimplement it in Managed Code like it would have been necessary for WP7.
We'll have to wait and see until the WP8 SDK is released because currently there is too little known to give definitive answers. Also we don't know if in WP8 you will be able to select a default browser (like in Windows RT) or if it will be IE10 whenever you click a link in an App (like in WP7).

Even though native code can run under winRT, it is not possible to port a browser due to missing APIs. There are numerous articles on this.
Example:http://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-firefox-would-be-crippled-on-windows-rt

You can't do a Desktop Browser as you are not allowed to run any Desktop-Code in Windows RT. This does not mean that you can't do a Metro only Browser. Although they would have limitations in the JavaScript area as they can't dynamically create code.
WebKit itself should be able to run without too many problems?

illegaloperation said:
This means that there will be some mobile sites that render poorly on Trident regardless of how modern or standard compliant (or not) Trident is.
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Click to collapse
In the long run, this is doubtful. First of all, WP grabs market share, slowly but steadily. Then, there's Opera Mobile which is still being used a lot. Lastly, WebKit features only specific -webkit prefixed features that Trident can't deliver. The more stable HTML5 and all its related standards become, the more unlikely such problems will become. Where actual standards based markup is used (which is what you need to use for either engine as long as you're using something that isn't still prefixed), both engines will render the same pages the same (in the long run, excluding specific bugs).
phailyoor said:
Even though native code can run under winRT, it is not possible to port a browser due to missing APIs. There are numerous articles on this.
Example:http://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-firefox-would-be-crippled-on-windows-rt
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
a) WinRT isn't exactly what WP8 will use.
b) Windows 8 features a specific Metro web browser application model which permits this after all. (Although I doubt we'll see this being available in WP8)
illegaloperation said:
Of cause up until now, Windows Phone users have been limited to using Trident, but since Microsoft has recently announced that it added native code for development to Windows Phone 8, does this open the ability of porting WebKit browsers and other WebKit components to Windows Phone?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The question is rather, will Microsoft permit alternative browsers? If you look at the situation now, a few Trident based ones are available - but something like Firefox or Chrome is a different thing. After all, Apple doesn't permit Firefox to use Gecko either.

Looking at phailyoor's Link it becomes obvious that you don't have certain possibilities in the WinRT Framework. You can't launch child processes (threads yes, but not processes), which is often used to decouple separate Tabs so a crash of one Tab doesn't crash the whole browser.
The second problem is that in WinRT you can't mark memory as Executable. Therefore you can't do dynamic compilation of JavaScript to machine code which would further on prevent a fast implementation of JavaScript. This would make many modern HTML5 pages likely to be really slow.
Microsoft won't ban alternative browsers but currently it seems like browsers based upon WinRT (e.g. as a Metro App) don't make a lot of sense.

So now that the SDK has leaked, can anyone provide update information on this?

Don't think we'll see one (or at least a good one) any time soon. Here's all the C++ project templates. So basically they would have to use Direct3d which I can't see happening without a lot of effort. Also, like mentioned above, I believe Windows 8/RT has a specific cutout to allow for browsers. WP8 definitely does not.
Windows Phone Direct3D App
A project for creating a Windows Phone app that uses Direct3D.
Windows Phone Runtime Component
A project for creating a Windows Phone Runtime component for a Windows Phone app.
Empty Dynamic Link Library
A project for creating a native dynamic-link library for a Windows Phone app.
Empty Static Library
A project for creating a native static library for a Windows Phone app.

They could always build it as a run time component and wrap it in .net/xaml. I think Chrome or Firefox for Windows 8 does the same.

APP sizes : Android vs WP

HI, I saw some apps on play store and WP market. I found that many apps on WP are smaller in size as compared to the same app on Android.
Examples:
Official Twitter app: By Twitter
Android : 6 MB
WP : 2 MB
Facebook app:
Android (official) : 13 MB
WP ( by Microsoft) : 4 MB
LinkedIn app (Official)
Android : 5MB
WP : < 1 MB
NY Times (Official)
Android : 2.3 MB
WP : 1 MB
Whatsapp : By Whatsapp
Android : 8 MB
WP : < 1 MB
Foursquare (Official)
Android: 10MB
WP: 5 MB
Angry Birds Star Wars
Android: 38 MB
WP : 20 MB
Angry Birds Space
Android : 36 MB
WP : 15 MB
Anyone viewing this thread, please post apps sizes if you also find same thing for any other app.
So, how do will explain this small app sizes on WP compared to Android.
Is WP OS more CODE efficient than Android
Does this efficiency contribute to smoothness of apps. Please share your thoughts.

As a developer, I can say for certain several things
1) Yes, the OS is way, way more "code efficient" than Android
2) The code is downloaded and compiled only once. I will not get into details as to why this is happening, but on Android, as far as I am aware, JIT occurs everytime you run the application.
Also, Visual Studio is able to create far smaller binaries when compared to Eclipse.
Bytecode(android+eclipse) tends to produce really large "binaries" while the IL(WP+VS) tends to create very effective "binaries".
My game, which contains around 100 graphical assets only eats around 5.53 MB of space. So yes, C#/C++/VB handle assets and binary size better than Java.
There's been some talk lately about porting Android to use C# instead of Java. Some tests were done as far as performance is concerned. Really interesting results
http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/05...-massive-performance-improvement-over-dalvik/
http://www.koushikdutta.com/2009/01/dalvik-vs-mono.html
Then there is also the problem of hardware variety. Windows Phone basically runs on the same chipsets and only has a few supported resolutions, whereas on Android, there are great many chipsets, each with their own sets of hardware assets and many possible resolutions. Developers need to write more code to make sure their apps work fine on as many phones as possible.

mcosmin222 said:
As a developer, I can say for certain several things
1) Yes, the OS is way, way more "code efficient" than Android
2) The code is downloaded and compiled only once. I will not get into details as to why this is happening, but on Android, as far as I am aware, JIT occurs everytime you run the application.
Also, Visual Studio is able to create far smaller binaries when compared to Eclipse.
Bytecode(android+eclipse) tends to produce really large "binaries" while the IL(WP+VS) tends to create very effective "binaries".
My game, which contains around 100 graphical assets only eats around 5.53 MB of space. So yes, C#/C++/VB handle assets and binary size better than Java.
There's been some talk lately about porting Android to use C# instead of Java. Some tests were done as far as performance is concerned. Really interesting results
http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/05...-massive-performance-improvement-over-dalvik/
http://www.koushikdutta.com/2009/01/dalvik-vs-mono.html
Then there is also the problem of hardware variety. Windows Phone basically runs on the same chipsets and only has a few supported resolutions, whereas on Android, there are great many chipsets, each with their own sets of hardware assets and many possible resolutions. Developers need to write more code to make sure their apps work fine on as many phones as possible.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Oh boy. Where to start.
Firstly, the WP OS is not more efficient than Android. Android consists of Java in the form of the Davlik virtual machine running on linux. In no way is this less efficient than C# running on the WP8 virtual machine on the NT kernel.
Bytecode is not Android + eclipse. Eclipse is an IDE, like visual studio. Bytecode is the compiled output from the Java compiler in the form of .class files. You can use any IDE (or none) to develop Android applications.
The size of a binary bears very little relation to it's efficiency. It all depends on the environment it runs under. For example, a single API call may, in one environment, relate to, say, 20 calls into some framework that is bundled with the app - therefore making the binary bigger. In another environment the single call may result in a single call into a function provided by the virtual machine. The end result is that roughly the same amount of code is executed. Also, part of the reason why Android binaries are larger is because they contained a cached version of the app for quicker startup.
Besides code, a binary may contain other artefacts, like graphic files or different resolutions, which will make the binary bigger.
The idea of using C# on android is absurd. C# is not supported on Linux (by Microsoft). There is, however, the mono open source version of C# (always guaranteed to be out of date) but the android libraries provided by Google are written in Java and there is no way they will use a proprietary language, like C#, as it will require the use of Microsoft technologies to run and that means they will have to pay Microsoft a license fee.
Why on earth would the leader in smartphone abandon their existing technologies to adopt one that will require a complete redevelopment of Android and, in addition, pay a license fee to Microsoft? Answer == they won't. Ever.

Dr.Paul said:
Oh boy. Where to start.
Firstly, the WP OS is not more efficient than Android. Android consists of Java in the form of the Davlik virtual machine running on linux. In no way is this less efficient than C# running on the WP8 virtual machine on the NT kernel.
Bytecode is not Android + eclipse. Eclipse is an IDE, like visual studio. Bytecode is the compiled output from the Java compiler in the form of .class files. You can use any IDE (or none) to develop Android applications.
The size of a binary bears very little relation to it's efficiency. It all depends on the environment it runs under. For example, a single API call may, in one environment, relate to, say, 20 calls into some framework that is bundled with the app - therefore making the binary bigger. In another environment the single call may result in a single call into a function provided by the virtual machine. The end result is that roughly the same amount of code is executed. Also, part of the reason why Android binaries are larger is because they contained a cached version of the app for quicker startup.
Besides code, a binary may contain other artefacts, like graphic files or different resolutions, which will make the binary bigger.
The idea of using C# on android is absurd. C# is not supported on Linux (by Microsoft). There is, however, the mono open source version of C# (always guaranteed to be out of date) but the android libraries provided by Google are written in Java and there is no way they will use a proprietary language, like C#, as it will require the use of Microsoft technologies to run and that means they will have to pay Microsoft a license fee.
Why on earth would the leader in smartphone abandon their existing technologies to adopt one that will require a complete redevelopment of Android and, in addition, pay a license fee to Microsoft? Answer == they won't. Ever.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Uhh...
Where do I start?
I know bytecode is NOT android+eclipse, I only mentioned the IDE and System, just as IL si not visual studio.
The size of the binary is influenced by how good the compiler is. Although it is not the only the only thing to take into consideration, the compiler does have a role in this.
C# on Linux/Android/Mac/iOS IS supported by Microsoft under the community promise license, so everybody can port C# and .NET to any system as long as they don't use this on windows, WITHOUT having to pay Microsoft anything... I suggest you get some documentation on what Mono and Dalvik are.
C# is just as open source as C on any platform apart from Windows.
As a matter of fact, porting Android to C# would benefit the platform greatly, as google has some issues with Oracle regarding the usage of Dalvik and Java on Android.
Oh, did I mention android has to code MORE due to variety of code...hmm...

No. You cannot judge the efficency of the compiler based on the resultant code size unless you are comparing like for like. You cannot compare two languages running on two different platforms like this and come to the conclusion that because the bytecode is smaller it must be more efficient.
I expect you are too young to remember the CISC vs. RISC debate some 20 or so years ago. RISC processors generated far more instructions than a CISC processors to perform the same operation, and hence had far larger binaries. However, RISC machines were far faster. So the complete opposite of what you are saying.
Different compilers may well generate different size binary files if one were to compare compilers compiling the same language. But again this does not mean the code in the smaller file will run quicker. Indeed it may actually run slower.
Code size is no indicator of efficiency.
As far as c sharp is concerned, only the language is free to use. None of the frameworks are. And Microsoft do not provide a c sharp compiler on any system besides windows.
There is not a chance in hell that Google will adopt it. If they were to change from java they will either use one of the languages they have developed or develop something new

I used the appropriate quotation marks when writing "code efficient", as it is a very broad term and comparisons over who is code efficient and who is not.
The way I understand it, a code efficient system is a system that has very high performance, such as windows phone, not that it has anything to do with size of binaries, but the OP asked if WP is a "code efficient" system, so i answered xD
.Net framework is also free to reverse engineer. You still have to pay for compilers however.

Interesting sidebit: in internal Google E-Mails that got published during the Oracle vs. Google trial over Java it was actually mentioned that using C# instead of Java would have been an option due to the fact that there are less licensing hassles attached to it's core library (which actually is standardized with ECMA) as compared to Java. They decided not to go that route as it would have taken a year to adapt Android and instead risk getting sued by Sun (which was later acquired by Oracle). So: yes, C# would have been just as good an option. Using something like Google Go wouldn't have simply because there was no developer community and it's a lot easier to get people working on your platform if they don't have to learn a new language first.
That aside: most likely the binary size isn't all that much relevant for how big the downloaded files are. And I won't even go into the fact that some of those Apps aren't written in Java on Android but use the NDK (at least Facebook and the Angry Birds games do on Android, most likeley the later do it on WP8 too).
So in the end it's most likely down to the embedded Audio and Graphics resources. As was already mentioned Android devices have to support a lot more resolutions which makes it likely that LowRes graphics are included as well to not tax slower devices with high-res graphics for no reason (given that you won't see the difference on LowRes displays). Another reason for this with regular Apps is that WP takes a chromeless-design-approach so you rarely have graphics included that serve as UI chrome.
Another reason might be that Microsoft put quite some effort into driving home the point that resources should not be included or used in a higher resolution than what they are intended to be displayed at. The reason was that it might have led to troubles with the memory-constrained Tango-devices which only have 256 MB of RAM. At least for high-profile developers that work together with Microsoft it's likely that those optimized their Apps for it.
Lastly and also already mentioned: third party libraries. Historically Microsoft has always packed a lot of functionality directly into it's system frameworks. So it's entirely possible that WP devs use third party libraries less often. Case in point: database functionality: many Android Apps use SQLite and include their own binaries for it. WP provides SQLServer CE which can simply be used by any App that needs it. This might change though as for W8/WP8-cross platform Apps Microsoft themselves suggest including SQLite given that there is no SQL CE Support for WinRT-Apps.
And for the finishing lines something on compilers and code size. Intels C++ compilers regularly produce bigger binaries because of optimization techniques like loop unrolling, etc. They also normally outperform competing compilers in performance benchmarks. But it's not that easy if you look not at a single App's performance but at the whole system. Having an App take up more memory means that other Apps will have to be terminated sooner to avoid an out-of-memory scenario and it is more taxing on the memory controller, which depending on the chipset used might lead to additional performance problems down the road (the Nvidia Tegra 3 is said to be severely limited by its memory controller). But especially with Managed Code like C# or Java the code size of the IL does not really mean too much in that regard as the code is compiled anyway before being executed. So the memory actually taken up during execution is a lot different from what gets downloaded.
A more interesting comparison though would be wether the WP8 compiled XAPs are smaller than their WP7 counterparts, given that WP8 does precompile the IL in the cloud. Might be interesting to see which of those is smaller.

Just did some comparisons on size of binaries between 7.5 and 8
1) XAP compiled for 7.5 is 5.53 MB
2) XAP compiled for 8 is 5.76 MB
Seems the 8 version is actually bigger, although not by much.

I love this thread!
Sent from my RaZr on MIUI.

I know about the comparison between Android and Windows Phone 8 from users who have made the switch.

Need help getting started with app development (windows, BSD) for stylus input note making app!

I have with experience in VLSI, shell scripting (bash, windows powershell) and basic programming languages like C and Python (Matlab too, which uses a similar syntax).
I want to get into app development but I am completely new to this and unfamiliar with the whole structure - the IO libraries, rendering libraries especially. I mainly like to develop it for Windows 11 (but would be nice if I could make it cross platform, say using something like Vulkan as rendering library).
I wish to make a stylus based note making app (similar to one note, drawboard pdf etc). I wish to know about the libraries available for taking input from surface pen (or other pens). I found that there are a few API available for windows - RealtimeStylus, Windows Ink, etc but I am unable to find anything cross platform. I would like to know if there are open source, or cross platform alternatives. Alternately, I would like to know if it is possible to bypass these and create a custom API myself (including my own algorithms for tracing curves and predicting handwriting etc, at present I am left to use whatever was done in these APIs I think), also possibly making it lower latency within the app. To some extent I realized that pen position is very similar to trackpad input (on the data input to pc side) and then we have tilt and pressure sensitivity data which I'm not sure how it is accessed and used. I remember reading a little about libsdl sometime ago. I would like to know if there are alternatives to libsdl, or if Vulkan supports any alternate libraries.
I would like to know how I could code a program that works on both x64 and aarch64 on windows 11 (Not into 32 bit as I belive my tool will use more than 4GB RAM anyway, as a priority), and as mentioned above, it would be fantastic if I could make it cross platform. What I got from this page is that ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/ ) if I write my program in C++ it should be possible to compile it for both x64 and aarch64 (and make possible optimizations for each of them separately). I am not sure how the whole development environment works - what is dotnet, what is unity, what is xamarin, and differences between each. I found a few code macros in dotnet that help in rejecting certain inputs (could be useful for palm rejection etc) : ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/do...s.uielement.isinputmethodenabled?view=net-5.0 ) (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.windows.uielement.ishittestvisible?view=net-5.0 ). As far as I am aware dotnet is cross platform. I might want to make instruction level optimizations to the software (like SSE, AVX, certain 64 bit instructions etc if that gives any hint) and would like to know if the dotnet environment/toolkit has sufficient low level coding possibility to access these. Also, I am curious if it supports vulkan or opengl. Vulkan is written in C++ and supports multiple platforms so I am more inclined to try it.