Memoirs of a Developer

One of the questions which are put forward to me most frequently is how to start programming bluetooth devices. This post is decided to offering a few short pointers for those who would like to start programming bluetooth radios for Windows Mobile 2002/2003 and Windows Mobile 5 devices.

To start off i would like to point out that there are a lot of different ways of accessing the bluetooth stacks and that i am only writing this for those who are still starting out in bluetooth programming. I will also be assuming that you have access to a Windows Mobile powered device along with Visual Studio 2003 / 2005 and a good amount of time to spare.

First of all make sure that you have your studio configured correctly and that your device allows you to perform on device debugging. This will be very useful because unlike other features of such devices, bluetooth is not properly emulated. Secondly go to the BTAccess download page ( here ) and download a free copy of the BTAccess Library that matches your device.

This should be enough for anyone who has a bluetooth enabled device to get the bundled tutorial up and running. This tutorial demonstrates how to access the bluetooth radio and how to call up the desired profiles in different languages ( c++, c# ). I would recommend that all of you who have not had much exposure to modular programming (e.g. Those coming from scripting languages, even though even those are modular now a days) dive into the bundled code rather than just try to learn by just reading about the provided APIs (most developers I have met tend to read API documentations and skip the actual technical documents and invariably end up stuck because of lack of knowledge of the functioning of this API). Better knowledge of what bluetooth is all about would definitly help a programmer understand what the API is offering and can imagine new ways of extending it.

In this post I have abstracted completely from the coding and assumed that the reader has a general understanding of what bluetooth is all about. I might be follow up this post eventually with two more posts one being more technical explaining the technicalities of bluetooth and another more programmatic detailing how you can actually code such applications (but I’ll have to find time to write the first). As always comments are always appreciated and if you have any ideas for what you would like me to cover please do so in the comments.

Links:

• Microsoft
• Windows Mobile
• High-Point