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I can't believe how much of pain getting my core Windows Mobile 6.5 development enviroment setup could be. Here are the hoops I've had to jump through so far. I ran into two really annoying hurdles which I couldn't find a solution for so I thought I'd note down what I did for any other people lucky enough to be in the same boat as yours truly. For the record, I'm trying to write my first 6.5 app for my HTC HD2. That is a WVGA phone which means it has a resolution of 480x800.

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So I finished with the Microsoft Office 2010 beta this week and moved onto their new Development and Design Action Pack. It's pretty sweet and gives me access to the full Office 2010 Professional Plus edition. I had the option of downloading either the 64bit or 32bit versions so I went for the 64bit version to suit my OS. Everything seemed sweet until I synced my phone. All my calendar and task entries dissapeared from my phone, even the ones I had manually entered into the phone that were not yet copied to my main system. Well pissed off. Did a bunch of reading and it seems that the current Windows Mobile Device Center does not support the 64bit version of Outlook 2010. The solution? Uninstall the entire office 2010 64bit office suite, download the 32bit version and install that. Pretty wank. I'm keeping both installers on my system for the day when the WMDC app gets updated. From what I read it seems quite unlikely that the WMDC app will get updated since they seem to think everyone uses Exchange. Wankers. The new install is almost done so I'm off to try and sync my devices again. Still pretty sore that I lost all my phone based calendar entries.

I work as a limited company consisting of just myself. I work in partnership with a few other companies were we work together on a daily basis but we still invoice each other for various tasks. As I'm such a small company (less than 100 people) and I'm working in IT that qualifies me for the Microsoft Action Pack Development and Design. What is that? Well it's a well cool way of me getting all the latest MS applications for a slim shave of the full price. I just paid £360ish (inc VAT) for access to the downloadable version. I have to pay that each year or whatever the renewel fee is. As new software gets released the package is updated so it means I'll always have the latest stuff.

The main things I'm interested in it for are Windows 7 Ultimate, Visual Studio 2010 and Office 2010. Just those alone come to around £1500 so I'm saving loads by using the action pack. If you're a small company like myself then I cannot the Microsoft Action Pack Development and Design enough.

I used to use Adobe CS4 Design Premium, last week I ordered the Adobe CS5 Web Premium Upgrade. I kinda screwed up the installation but did run into a few things that might hit other people going the upgrade route.

• Close all your open apps including browser windows. Don't attempt to do anything during the install as if any of the Adobe shizzle is in use whilst it's being installed or uninstalled then you effectively can hang the Adobe installer.
• CS5 doesn't uninstall CS4. I had to uninstall both after the first "upgrade" as uninstalling CS4 after installing the upgrade means it also removes some of the things CS5 installed!. Lesson to learn here, uninstall the old version first. I chose to leave my preferences for CS4 after the uninstall since I wasn't sure if the CS5 upgrade would look for those.
• Installation of the Flash Player 10 Plugin kept failing. It would hold up the installer so that the estimated time would just keep increasing. I left it overnight by accident and saw it at about 3500 minutes remaining. The simple fix for this if it hits you mid install is to CTRL-ALT-DEL to task manager and look for the installer that says it's for the Flash Player 10 Plugin. I forced that to close which then prompted the CS5 installer to continue. At the end it does complain that some components failed, meaning the FP10 one.
• An alternative would be to look through each of the apps listed at the start of the installer and untick all instances of the FP10 plugin. I haven't done this so I don't know if it has its own set of repurcusions.
• Visit Adobes Get Flash page and install the FP10 plugin manually.
• Fire up one of the apps like Flash CS5 and then choose Help->Updates and start the updates going.
• Restart and you should be done.

When I bought the phone one of the driving forces in my mind was that I wanted to get rid of my piece of junk Creative Zen MP3 Player. I've hated that since I bought it. At first the HD2 seemed to be fine but one problem I had was that the provided headphones always fell out of my ears. I skateboard all over the place so I'll be using the Music playing functionality for at least an hour a day. I've always had problems with headphones poping out of my ears, always seems to be the left one. I decided to buy some "Panasonic RP-HS33E Lightweight Headphones" from play.com as they were mega cheap and hook around my ears. I had a bunch of others in my list but decided to start with the cheapest and work my way up. Luckily I struck gold with my first shot so I thought I was sorted.

Over the past few months however the HD2 has been acting up when I'm out and about. Here's the scenario, I'm skating down the street, listening to some tunes with Nitrogen (the music player I like on the HD2), the music suddenly cuts out and I can hear the ring tone like I've just called someone. I have to quickly stop skating, whip the phone out of my pocket and lo-and-behold, I've dialed the last number in my call history. It's well pissed me off. It will do it over and over again. It also does other cooky stuff like starts playing the HTC Music player. That one is a really bad glitch since the HTC player uses the phones global volume whilst Nitrogen seems to use a percentage of the main volume. That's a bit better explained like this. I prefer to set the phone volume to 100%. In Nitrogen I set the volume to 50%. This means my music plays at 50% of the global phone volume which is fine. If I set the global phone volume to 50% then Nitrogen, being set to 50% then plays at 25% of the global volume. I hope this makes sense to you. So, I'm skating down the road, listening to something nice and chilled with Nitrogen set to about 35% global volume. All of the sudden whatever last track was played in the HTC player will kick in at 100% volume. Yesterday, going down a rather steep hill I practically jumped off my board when that happened. I made a yelping noise that the people I passed thought was either really funny or a case of turrets as I followed it be a lot of loud swearing.

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