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Win CE Audible Spanish Flashcards January 20, 2012

This is an update of previous work on the Win CE Spanish Flashcards program I wrote earlier.  I find that driving while using this I would look away too often from the road, which is stupidly unsafe. The new and improved program here will speak the word displayed in a sexy Spanish lady’s voice while displaying the word.  You can turn it off by pressing the Options button on the bottom left of the screen.  Everything else works as before.

I ran into a nasty little problem while creating the .CAB file which contains the installation, since I have a thousand sound files, which is more than the cabwiz.exe which comes with Visual Studio 2008 can accommodate…and the error code for this defect is completely unhelpful, in the grand Microsoft tradition:

Error: File c:\users\[me]\appdata\local\temp\wizbbe1.inf contains DirIDs, which are not supported

ERROR: The Windows CE CAB Wizard encountered an error.  See the output window for more information.

It turns out that VS2008’s cabwiz.exe chokes on more than 998 included files, and this application has 1057.  The workaround is to download the SDK for Windows Mobile 6 and use the cabwiz.exe (and the cabwiz.ddf) from that version instead (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\SmartDevices\SDK\SDKTools\CabWiz.exe and CabWiz.ddf with the ones under C:\Program Files\Windows Mobile 6 SDK\Tools\CabWiz). No problem once I had done this.

Here is the all-new singing and dancing Win CE Spanish Flashcards App.

Win CE 5.0 Dictation Application December 15, 2011

I never found an application which would automatically take a note for me when I would just talk to it (without having to push a button first), so I wrote one.  Be happy for me; this is my second useful application for WinCE and I’m actually quite thrilled.  I have a long commute and often think of little notes I should jot down, and have no hands-free way of doing this…until now.

Dictation gives me sixty seconds of WAV-file goodness, with the recording beginning as soon as it opens.  I used the “Voice Speed Dial” in the Settings menu to record my voice saying “Dictation”.  This device opens the application for me, and the app does the rest, leaving the WAV file with a timestamp-based filename in the Dictation directory when the Save button is hit (take your time; it won’t go more than sixty seconds).  I can then restart the recording and get another WAV file with the second button for the next result and so on, but this requires button pressing.  A third button closes the app, which is oddly enough required for this application so Voice Speed Dial can automatically reopen the application later¹, when inspiration and/or regret strikes.

¹ WinCE applications do not usually close by themselves, which can eat up a lot of memory if you don’t manage that yourself.  Of course, this comes in handy if you want the FlashCards application to keep your place, as I do.

Adventures in C# .NET Programming November 4, 2011

I promised a while ago to write a review of James Foxall’s Teach Yourself Visual C# 2008 in 24 Hours and I meant it at the time.  Instead I have found that I learned enough from his first book Teach Yourself Visual Basic 2008 in 24 Hours: Complete Starter Kit.  The two languages are much alike and the .NET framework supports them both.  I am probably going to stick with C# since my company uses it in its various scientific applications.  The other reason is that I need to learn a heck of a lot more than how to use the interface, so I started to program a flashcard program for Spanish.

Like all frail, elderly types I have real trouble learning a new language so I looked for a flashcard program with mixed success.  Professional programs for my (also frail, elderly) phone (a WinCE 5.0 job) cost a pile and had really tiny fonts.  I decided to make my own.

I don’t know that I need to tell you how hard this was or how many times I had to ask for help from wiser minds (thanks Ben, Shabnam and Mark!) with the requisite 10000 hours under their belts.  But I muddled through somehow and even figured out what went wrong on the last few things without help from my cow-orkers (hyphenation intentional).

Here’s how it looks on the emulator:

You can see that it’s set for the second set of flashcards (twenty words a set, fifty sets).  The top button flips to a new Spanish word.  The bottom will show you the English equivalent if you press it.  My phone and the emulator have trouble with accented Spanish characters, but that’s a job for the future.

I learned to parse files from WordsGalore, a free flashcard program for PC which I strongly recommend, with support for Spanish, Chinese and Korean.  I haven’t included much of WordsGalore’s marvelous functionality such as the elimination of words in which the student is already confident, but the phone probably can’t handle it (not just that I can’t program it, yet).  I learned the basics of debugging using Visual Studio 2008.  I learned to plagiarize by examining other’s code (“only please to call it ‘research’”).  I learned how to make .CAB files for easy distribution (look here).  I learned that my cow-orkers are very patient with me, for which I am truly grateful.

Exciting update:  I modified it to include a switch button which allows the English words to display first instead: