Reading SMS messages off Windows Mobile phone connected via ActiveSync?

Question

I have a project I'm working on that requires our WPF application read SMS messages off of a user's connected Windows Mobile phone so we can display recent ones, etc.

I've had little luck with any of the libraries I've found. Most promising seemed to be OpenNETCF.Desktop.Communications but ultimately it seems like I won't be able to do what I need to with it.

What's the best way to read SMS messages off of a connected phone? Will it just be easier for me to write some sort of service app for the phone that acts as a server and our WPF app as the client?

Thanks!

Answer 1

There's nothing out-of-the-box that will do what you want. RAPI, which the OpenNETCF library wraps, has a set of communication APIs, but nothing for SMS. It does have the ability to snap-in custom APIs, so you could create a custom API and use that. The advantage with this strategy is you don't need any user intervention to get stuff onto the device (no copy and run of a service app stuff). The down side is that the custom RAPI DLL for the device must be native code.

If you go with your own mechanism, you can then use the POOM APIs in managed code to get the messages and ship them. The only challenge there is that you have to run some form of a "service" app on the device to listen for calls, which means writing your own protocol, which means a fairly large test matrix.

Answer 2

Jeyo have a product that pulls SMS messages from a phone into outlook PST files. Strikes me that you could just use that product and trawl the PST for recent messages (bit of a kludge I know, but if you were desperate) or talk to them about if they'll licence some of their code for you?