Tired of whacking rats

I’m fed up with Windows Mobile. Fed up with it from an enterprise device perspective, anyway. See, most customers want a limited set of applications to run on their device. If it’s only one, you can write a full-screen app and hide the Start bar at the top, and maybe the menu bar at the bottom if you don’t need the on-screen keyboard. Two, and you have to find a way to switch between them (and recently it seems that the second one is TomTom Navigator, which doesn’t co-operate anyway) and stop anything else being run.

And so you do this, and bing! up pops a notification. So you work out how to kill that one and bing! here comes another one. It’s like playing Whack-A-Rat.

And I’m tired of it. I’m tired of trying to make my programs survive a cold boot, when your OEM subtly changes how it works from device to device (Symbol MC3090 – breaks the convention of ‘Application folder is for developers’ by lumping the wireless configuration utilities in there, and they have to match the wireless driver version, so you can no longer write to a hex file). But Windows Mobile 5.0 has persistent storage, right? Yes, but OS updates include a wipe of persistent storage, because the registry settings in persistent storage are a diff from the ROM version, so you change the ROM registry, you break the diff, and now you have to work out how to persist your program across clean boots. Or the OEM has inexplicably made the clean boot a simple keypress, with a confirmation prompt, but one so confusing where you press one half of a rocker for YES, I’d like to destroy my applications, and one for NO, actually I’d like to keep them please, and not marked them clearly or the instructions are confusing so the user that meant to say NO says YES by mistake, or they’re labelled the wrong damn way round in the first place and you still have to make the damn program survive!

…and breathe…

…and now you have to come up with a way to do program and firmware upgrades over the air, only it wasn’t designed in, because we were going to use the OEM’s system, but we can’t use that because a) it costs a bomb and b) it sucks and c) it blows as well and you find that you can’t do a complete device reload because the damn ROM image is too big to fit in RAM or persistent storage alongside the updates to your program because they couldn’t find room in ROM for .NET ‘Compact’ Framework and SQL Server ‘Compact’ Edition so you have to do it a bit at a time and now you’re trying to fudge it all at the last minute and then which bit has to chain which other bit and how do we do this on a schedule so updates don’t interfere with the user’s work and I DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR DEVICE MANAGEMENT DAMMIT!