[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Mandragore:
Hi gps-lover,

I've been keep an eye on your progress ever since trying your very first releases. TaskFacade always showed much potential, but RC3 finally made me try again after a long time. Thanks for all your efforts! Here is my feedback.

First I must admit WkTASK works faster and easier for me. Because using both hands I can quickly and precisely tap any running application icon on the taskbar. And once I've tapped an icon, that application shows in an instant. But TaskFacade has it's advantages as well.

Having TaskFacade mapped to whatever HW button through AEButtonPlus allows me to switch applications one handed. Left or right handed, doesn't matter. Very handy. And it's a much, much prettier solution. Especially with htctoucher's beautiful skin I've tried full screen. Well done, both of you!

It takes only about more than a second to show four running applications and a second more to show the application I switched to. Quite impressive, when you think about it. Nevertheless it seems to take forever, compared to how fast my optimized Diamond responds under other circumstances ;)

At first I was confused by it's behaviour after waking up the device. Most of the time TaskFacade wasn't running anymore. Sometimes it still was, but wouldn't show on wake up, even though I checked that option. And only a few times it would show on wake up.

After some research I think it has nothing to do with TaskFacade. It seems I'm just running too many processes. Sometimes I reach the 32 limit and TaskFacade is out of luck.. I'll have to take care of that myself by screening what I really need to run.

Something else. I have cprog.exe, repllog.exe, shell32.exe and manila.exe excluded in TaskFacade. So far so good. When I have two or more non-excluded applications running, it shows them just fine.

With just one non-excluded application running, TaskFacade tries to do something, but no visuals. I guess that's normal, no need to show one application. But I'm wondering why it uses the cpu for up to more than 50% before gradually returning to 0% in about 8 or 9 seconds, to figure that out.

Maybe you can improve your code and check faster if there is no need to do anything. Then again, this would apparently force me to run at least two non-excluded applications, before I can change TaskFacade's behaviour through it's menu's.

By the way, it looks like choosing anything from the TaskFacade menu's copies another TaskFacade instance, doubling the amount of memory it uses and taking up another process slot. Probably no problem under normal circumstances.

Even so, would you consider removing the options code from the screen shot and visual task switching code, and offer a seperate configuration application, like a lot of other developers do?

Who knows, maybe you can optimize the main code, reduce the memory footprint and speed up the visual task switching even more..

Finally, sorry if you are already aware of this next problem, but I can reproduce a crash. When I have no non-excluded applications running and there is nothing for TaskFacade to show, I get the following error when I activate TaskFacade anyway. Let me know if you want more information and keep up the good work!

TaskFacade.exe

DivideByZeroException

bij TaskFacade.MainForm.InitBounds()

bij TaskFacade.MainForm.InitTile(Boolean needsRefesh)

bij TaskFacade.MainForm.OnActivated(EventArgs e)

bij System.Windows.Forms.Form.WnProc(WM wm, Int32 wParam, Int32 lParam)

bij System.Windows.Forms.Control._InternalWnProc(WM wm, Int32 wParam, Int32 lParam)

bij Microsoft.AGL.Forms.EVL.EnterMainLoop(IntPtr hwnMain)

bij System.Windows.Forms.Application.Run(Form fm)

bij TaskFacade.Program.Main()