One of the projects I’ve been working on recently involves managing Windows Mobile devices; Tim and I have gotten to spend a bit of time playing with some very cool software. However, we both noticed that Windows Mobile makes some tasks unnecessarily complicated, such as verifying basic network connectivity. For example, can you tell me how to do any of the following under WM 6.0:
- Determine which network interfaces you have running at any given moment
- Determine the actual IP address configuration a network interface has
- Run basic connectivity tools such as ping and traceroute to validate that your device can talk to other network devices
Thanks to a tip from someone at Microsoft, I was introduced to the lovely free tools provided by Enterprise Mobile, including the spiffy Windows Mobile IP Utility. This lovely tool gives you a great view of what’s going on network-wise with your device…including see the pseudo-devices that are created when you cradle your device (and the funky networking that goes on there).
They also make the GUI CAB Signing Utility, which is especially useful if you’re pushing software applications out to your Windows Mobile device and want them signed. It’s basically a GUI wrapper around the .NET Framework’s signtool.exe binary, allowing you to easilly select one or more .CAB files, pick an appropriate certificate from your Personal certificate store (must have the Code Signing capability), select the output directory, and let it rip. I’ve got a screenshot of it in action in this separate picture over here. For some reason, my computer keeps giving me a signtool error, but the folks at Enterprise Mobile have contacted me and are going to help me troubleshoot this issue over the next few days. Very cool for them!
