Quick Hitter: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Champion versus challenger. The perennial winner versus the lovable loser. The guy people love to hate versus the guy people love to cheer. The same qualities that make a heated sports rivalry so spectacular are in full effect in Seth Gordon's amazing documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. Gordon's story details the battle between challenger Steve Wiebe and champion Billy Mitchell as they vie for the Donkey Kong world record. Wiebe, with a wife, two kids, no job, and a penchant for crying, fights for integrity and respectability. Mitchell, the 1980's arcade master with the 1970's haircut, fights for video game supremacy. Colorful characters are plentiful throughout which only adds to the narrative. A highly gripping and entertaining picture.

What is a movie review doing on a blog about mobile and embedded technology?

Well, the main CPU for the Donkey Kong arcade game machine was a Zilog Z80.

Quick Hitter: Installing Windows Embedded CE 6

During the installation of Windows Embedded CE 6, sometimes the installer displays a dialog box stating that it "Could not access network location [url]." An example of this is displayed in Image 1. Hitting the Retry button on the dialog may not have any effect at first. What appears to work when this occurs is to open Internet Explorer, type the url in the location bar and hit Enter. Hit the Cancel button on the File Download dialog. Then, go back to the installer dialog and hit the Retry button again. This time it should work fine.

Image 1 - Error Dialog

Webcast Review: Testing the Most Critical Part of Your Application

In this webcast, Microsoft MVP and frequent MSDN Webcast presenter Jim Wilson provides an overview and a demonstration of the Local Server Framework. The Local Server Framework, also known as FakeServer, is a new tool included with the Windows Mobile 6 SDK. The Local Server Framework provides both a native dll and a managed wrapper for setting up a testing server which runs directly on a Windows Mobile device.

Running a test server on a Windows Mobile device provides greater control over an application's test environment by removing network setup and maintenance from the equation. When building mobile applications, often times the server component is being developed in parallel with the client. Using the Local Server Framework for testing, therefore, is a great way to cut down on the impact of client and server modifications. Jim mentions how blame for miscommunication when versions are out of sync is usually placed on the client because it is the application that exposes the error. For this and other reasons, he believes that a mobile client should not trust server data unconditionally and that the application should validate transmitted data just like user-entered data. By using the Local Server Framework, developers can modify the FakeServer to see how their mobile applications respond to these and other spurious inputs.

From an information perspective, this is a great resource on the Local Server Framework, a tool which has not seen nearly any publicity since the release of Windows Mobile 6. This webcast shares the necessary information needed to get started using the Local Server Framework making it very effective.