Silverlight detecting devices - silverlight-3.0

I would like to know if silverlight can access devices such as GPS or a form of location base device that can tell the application the returned location.
Thanks.

Per this SO answer, it's not feasible in 3.0 (it would require reading a COM port, and SL 3 can't do that), though there are hopes in 4.0 with an auxiliary COM object (if and where you can convince your users to install such a COM object, of course;-).

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Access Blackberry switch on/off and data usage logs

Not sure if this is the right place to ask the question.
I have a Blackberry Curve 9300 phone. Is it possible the access logs which shows when the phone was switched on and off. Also if it is logged when the data was used over network and over WiFi.
I would like to access it without using any code if possible. However, I do not mind a quick and dirty C# application that could allow me to do so. This is a once off activity and I do not really want to invest lot of time in writing code.
try using EventLogger API to get System events,and save it in Persistant DB as as the part of the your application and use it when required

BlackBerry - call time tracking application

hallo,
I have a common question, I hope it is ok to ask it here.
I have a project, where I should develop a small appliation for BlackBerry. I know Java ME is the platform to do that (Browser and Widget are other opstion).
What I need to do is a samll application which pops-up after every call and asks the user if he wants to save(assign) this conversation (only the duration in minutes of the phone call is important) in his time-tracking database. He can click NO, but after it, he can start my application and see all unassigned phone calls and still he can assign them in the time-tracking db. This should happen offline and than be synchronized with the server via online connection.
My question now:
What APIs are to be used, for handling with the phone-calls?
Are there some downsides in this kind of application, which I newby can not see at first?
What about the different devices?
Thanks for any information you share with me, to help me avoid common newby mistakes!
Thnaks a lot.
That should definitely be doable, look at the PhoneListener interface to check when the phone call disconnects. What I would do is write the application as a system module, that will run in the background on startup. You can use an alternate entry point so that when the user clicks on your icon the application will create a GUI.
Edit: By the way BlackBerry uses an extended version of J2ME. You can ignore all the RIM specific extensions if you want and develop an app that will (theoretically) work on any J2ME device but you won't be able to use a lot of nice features including the PhoneListener interface. I doubt you'll be able to create this specific application with J2ME alone.

Is there a way to determine if a user is using broadband or dial-up

We have a requirement from a customer to provide a "lite" version for dial-up and all the bells-and-whistles for a broadband user.
The solution will use Flex / Flash / Java EJB and some jsp.
Is there a way for the web server to distinguish between the two?
You don't care about the user's connection type, you care about the download speed.
Have a tiny flash app that downloads the rest the of the flash, and times how long it takes. Or an HTML page that times how long an Ajax download takes.
If the download of the rich-featured app takes too long, have the initially downloaded stub page/flash redirect to the slow download page (or download the bare-bones flash app, or whatever).
The simplest and most reliable mechanism is probably to get the user to select their connection type from a drop down. Simple, I know, but it may save you a world of grief!
There's no way to distinguish between a broadband or dial-up as a connection type, but you can make an educated guess by connection speed.
Gmail does this and provides a link to a basic HTML version of their service if they detect it.
(source: nirmaltv.com)
My guess is that there is some client side javascript polling done on AJAX requests. If the turnaround time surpasses a threshold, the option to switch to "lite" appears.
The best part about this option is that you allow the user to choose if they want to use the lite version instead of forcing them.
Here's a short code snippet from a code who attempted something similar. It's in C#, but it's pretty short and it's just the concept that's of interest.
Determine the Connection Speed of your client
Of course, they could be a temporary speed problem that has nothing to do with the user's connection at the time you test, etc, etc.
I had a similar problem a couple of years ago and just let the user choose between the hi and lo bandwidth sites. The very first thing I loaded on the page was this option, so they could move on quickly.
I think the typical approach to this is just to ask the user. If you don't feel confidant that your users will provide an accurate answer, I suspect you'll have to write an application that runs a speed test on the client. Typically these record how long it takes the client to receive x number of bytes, and use that to determine bandwidth.
Actionscript 3 has a library to help you with this task, but I believe it requires you to deploy your flex/flash app on Flash Media Server. See ActionScript 3.0 native bandwidth detection for details.
#Apphacker (I'd comment instead of answering if I had enough reputation...):
Can't guarantee the reverse, either--I have Earthlink dial-up, soon to upgrade to Earthlink DSL (it's what's available here...).
You could check their IP and see if it resolves to/is assigned to a dial up provider, such as AOL, Earthlink, NetZero. Wouldn't guarantee that those that don't resolve to such a provider are broadband users.
you could ...
ask the user
perform a speed test and ask the user if the result you found is correct
perform a speed test and hope that the result found is correct
I think a speed test should be enough.
If you only have a small well known user group it is sometimes possible to determine the connection speed by the ip. (Some providers assign different subnets to dial-up/broadband connections)

Get the BIOS time in LINGO

Can someone tell me how to get the BIOS time in Lingo?
_system.time() will give you the system time.
You can also use the good old Lingo syntaxed "the systemDate" wich is an object with properties such as ".seconds" for example.
To access the BIOS probably need a custom built xtra. You can build one in Delphi or C/C++ but to make it auto-downloadable you need to sign if i remember correctly (Long time since I made one). :-)

Viewing DirectX application remotely

We're working on an application that displays information through a Direct3D visualisation. A late client request is the ability to view this application via some Remote Desktop solution.
Has anyone done anything similar? What options are available / unavailable? I'm thinking RDC, VNC, Citrix...
Any advice?
I think you can still use all of the normal D3D tools, but you won't be able to render to a surface associated with the screen. You'll have to render to a DIB (or some such) and Blt it with GDI to a normal window HDC. RDC/VNC/Citrix should all work with this technique.
Performance will definitely suffer - but that's going to be the case over remote desktop anyway. In fact, if I were you, I would mock up a VERY simple prototype and demonstrate the performance before committing to it.
Good luck!
I think Windows 7 has D3D remoting stuff - probably requires both client and server to be W7 though.
The build-in remote desktop works. (You don't have to do anything special)
But it is extremely slow, because when in doubt, it just sends the contents of a window as a bitmap.

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