Have you ever been ever so slightly lazy when it comes to making phone calls? No, I don’t mean procrastinating when it comes to making calls you for some reason don’t feel like you’re in a hurry to do. But the kind of laziness where you feel it’s a hassle to pick up the phone to send an sms, and end up doing it on your desktop instead. I have a plug-in in Outlook that will let me send sms, or I could do it via something built upon Kannel, etc, so that’s sorted though. I decided to have a look at something similar for making calls from the desktop.

Now, I am aware of a product called Office Communications Server, and vendors like Cisco with their software. That’s besides the point for now though Just like food, it tastes better when it’s home made. (Or rather you learn more making your own pizza than having it delivered.)

While browsing the Compact Framework API for something completely different I stumbled across easily accessible methods that will allow me to make calls programmatically. It’s really no effort as you can see from the few lines of code below.

In this case I’ve created a small console application (no graphical interface) that dials the number “1234”, but I could use a number supplied as an argument too for that matter.

Hey, this is nice for spying purposes! Well, no. It’s not placed as a “secret” call in the background. The user will notice that the device makes a call, or notice after the call has been made if it was in his pocket at the time.

It’s not a feature complete program at the moment. We’re missing a delivery system – I mean, we can’t have a program on the device without there being some desktop/server side mechanism of triggering the client. If you have an MDM solution that let you do push of management commands it could work. Or you could send an sms from the server, intercept the message, and trigger it. You could expand the client to listen to some server, and do something a bit like ActiveSync.

But isn’t this a light overkill when you could just pick up the phone and use the keypad directly? Well, the best thing after sliced bread it certainly is not, but it could make things more user friendly in some scenarios. Take for instance a phone list on the intranet – look up the number, hit “dial” and you’re off. Or if you’re sitting in front of the desktop most of the time, wearing a headset, and making calls while the device is somewhere else on the desk. (No function to hang up here though, so maybe you should still keep the device nearby.)

Anyways, some times I just come up with crazy ideas, and leave it for others to decide if it’s worth pursuing further I haven’t attached a download of the program above, but if someone is interested I could probably do a proper compile and upload.

Ah, but how to test the program, passing parameters without a command line? (I cheated and ran it through Visual Studio.) I’m sure some of you are already familiar with Rapi Tools – the rest of you download them, and add them to your toolbox:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~itsme/projects/xda/tools.html

Very convenient. Use prun.exe with the app executable and parameters on your desktop, and the device executes. (You need to cradle with ActiveSync so it really only serves a practical purpose in testing scenarios.)
 

So I’ll talk to you later then (Ah, the hilarious puns one come up with late at night…)