After few tries and tricks, I was successful, and I’m going to share that here for easy future reference. To best understand the problem, let’s begin from start. Here is how my application was appearing on Jelly Bean 4.2:

But if I look at other native application of the Jelly Bean, they have quite different theme and styles as shown below:

So, I wanted to look my application dialog similar to above one on Jelly Bean or higher version, but still appear the same on the old version. The trick lies in the styles XML files in corresponding Android version folder. So, I create my custom theme styles (in res/values/styles.xml):

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <style name="MainTheme" parent="@android:style/Theme.Light.NoTitleBar"></style>
</resources>

Here I’m defining the MainTheme for my application and inheriting it from the Android built-in “Theme.Light.NoTitleBar”. This is the style I plan to apply to my main Activity in the Application manifest file by adding following attribute:android:theme=”@style/MainTheme”

Note: I’m using the “Theme.Light.NoTitleBar” as the parent style because I don’t want a default TitleBar in my application. If you want one, please choose the “Theme.Light”.

This is not all you want, but the magic comes by adding the correct style based on higher version styles. For this you create res/values-v11/styles.xml (for Android 3.0+) and res/values-v14/styles.xml (for Android 4.1) files under corresponding values-XX folders.

So here is the XML file I created under res/values-v11/styles.xml:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <style name="MainTheme" parent="@android:style/Theme.Holo.Light.NoActionBar"></style>
</resources>

And here is the XML file I created under res/values-v14/styles.xml:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <style name="MainTheme" parent="@android:style/Theme.DeviceDefault.Light.NoActionBar"></style>
</resources>

As you can see I’m using the different parent style per Android version, and this does the magic. Now if you run your applicaiton on Android 2.2 or 2.3 it will use the default theme “Theme.Light.NoTitleBar”. If you run it on Android 3.0+ version, it will use Theme.Holo.Light.NoActionBar style, and similarly for Android 4.1, it will use Theme.DeviceDefault.Light.NoActionBar.

Note: To use the higher version styles, you must set your Android target version to the higher version i.e. “4.1″. Otherwise you will get the resource/style not found error.

Now if I run the application on 4.1, it will use the native theme on all the UI components as shown below:

It was a bit tricky to grasp in start, but once you get used to this theme concept model based on version folder, you will see how powerful this is when designing applications for future versions but still maintaining backward comparability with older versions. If you want to read more, I highly recommend you to check official “Themes and Styles” guidelines on Android website:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/themes.html

Fortunately, due to powerfull ISAPI support, there are already many powerful 3rd Party applications available which provides really good URL Rewrite support. I would like to mention two of these:
www.isapirewrite.com
www.urlrewriter.net

However, I recently needed to use the similar function on one of client website which is running on IIS 7, and before trying any of these 3rd Party tools, I decided to search and see if IIS 7.0 support and Viola! It does. The URL Rewrite module in IIS 7 is not only as powerful as you would expect it to be (supporting most of the Apache counterpart URL rewrite module), but its integration in the IIS Manager is a big plus. You can easily add and test rules them using the visual interface. Here is a very good beginner tutorial:
http://www.iis.net/learn/extensions/url-rewrite-module/creating-rewrite-rules-for-the-url-rewrite-module

For some of the geeky fans, who still like the type this instead of wasting time in UI dialog, these rewrite rules are stored in your website web.config file, so you can view, add or edit these directly there too. Here is a sample of how these rules appear in the web.config file:

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<rewrite>
	<rules>
		<rule name="Rewrite to article.aspx">
			<match url="^article/([0-9]+)/([_0-9a-z-]+)" />
			<action type="Rewrite" url="article.aspx?id={R:1}&amp;title={R:2}" />
		</rule>
	</rules>
</rewrite>

You still have to type more than you have to do for something similar in Apache and other 3rd Party URL rewrite tools, but this is because of the XML syntax, and there price you have to pay for better (debatable) data format.

However, with time, I learned something more about this ROM, and applied few more tricks to get a very smooth running Jelly Bean on my Nexus One (haven’t had a single crash since last 4 days). I thought to share these with others using the same (or similar ROMs) and see if this helps you guys too. So, here these are:

1: Custom Camera Application
The Camera in this ROM works, but it’s just functional i.e. the picture quality is very bad. I know the N1 camera quality is great, because I have used this a lot in Gingerbread and loved the quality. Fortunately, there are some workarounds available. The simplest is to use 3rd Party camera application from the Google Play store. The one I’m using and highly recommend are:
Camera ZOOM FX
HDR Camera

You will get way good quality pictures with these applications than the stock camera application.

2: Use SD Card Booster
I recommend installing some SD Card Booster form the Google App Store. There are many, but I tried the following and it works well for me:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sdincrease.it

For my SD-Card, I got best performance with 1024 size. You can try few values on your system, and see which one works well for you. Once configured properly, you should get some good speed in running applications and playing movies from the SD-Card.

3: Install/Update Google Search
Go to Google Play store, search for “Google Search” and it will let you install or update the Google Search version. With this, you can use the voice search and input using the keyboard. It still needs the Internet (no offline version available yet) but still it’s better than nothing.

4: Integrate Link2SD
If you are using the Jelly Bean or any other custom ROM which provides the ROOT access, then I think this is the must have application for you. You can download Link2SD this from Google PlyStore. The configuration is simple, and there are many tutorials on how to setup this. So, I will not go into that detail. However, I would recommend one thing special, and that’s if you are using this ROM, partition your SD-Ext as FAT32 (instead of Ext2, Ext3 or Ext4). Though the linux paritions like EXT3 or EXT4 works, I had lot of permission issues using these. But FAT32 worked very well for me. If you are using Windows, you can use the MiniTool Partition tool to format your SD-Card. Again, there are many online tutorial on how to do that, so will not go in these details.

Note: Link2SD can’t work be juxtaposed with A2SD or similar scripts. So, if you want to use this, don’t use built-in A2SD or any other SD-Ext manager application.

5: Keep Dalvik Cache in Internal Memory
If you have low access speed SD-Card, then you may find it better to keep the Dalvik Cache in the internal memory. Doing this I have found the application to be more responsive and speedy. I’m not a guru on Android architecture, so may be there are some shortfalls of this, but so far this (keeping Dalvik Cahce in internal memory) has been working great for me. So, other thing I did different for Jelly Bean 4.2.1, is to keep the Dalvik Cache in internal memory. If you followed that ROM steps, for A2SD install, you need to do this in terminal:

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# su 
# a2sd install
N 
N
Y

This means that you may have to keep cleaning up the Dalvik Cache from time to time. But fortunately you can do this from Recovery (I’m using CynogenMod Recovery). When you do this, system will build the cache again on next start-up. It should work well if you have comparatively low number of applications.

Note: If you want to use the A2SD, then you must have the Ext2 or Ext4 as second partition. Having the Fat32 as second partition works well with Link2SD, but doesn’t work with A2SD (and it doesn’t complain about this either). It simply will not move the cache.

When the cookies are disabled by the user security policies, then ASP.Net auto detect this and adds the session info in the URL of the each request, something like::
~/(X(1)S(cp53yq30mtagv555unhr0t45))/system/index.aspx

The cryptic path “(X(1)S(cp53yq30mtagv555unhr0t45))” in the URL is actually used to indicate the session ID. ASP.Net auto manage the addition and removal of this session info, and in the ASP.Net codebehind, you don’t need to worry about this. Even you don’t get this URL with session info with Request.URL or any other property.

The only limitation is that this breaks when you try to redirect from ASP.Net to an absolute URL e.g. “/system/index.asp”. We normally don’t use any absolute URL in our application, but there are few places where the absolute path is used (mostly to handle protocol changes), and we discovered that it was causing mysterious automatic log-out for some users (which were not allowing cookies).

The fix, fortunately, was very simple. The ASP.Net naively provides a method which add the current session ID to the URL if using the Cookieless mode. The method is HttpResponse.ApplyAppPathModifier and you can apply this by simply calling and passing required absolute URL:

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string redirectUrl = Response.ApplyAppPathModifier("/system/index.aspx")

The beauty of this method is that it auto detects the session mode and only appends session info, if required. If want to know more about Cookieless session in general, I would suggestion this MSDN article:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479314.aspx

However from time to time, the SD-Ext partition used by Link2SD gets corrupt. Now I’m not very sure whom to blame for this i.e. Android Kernal, Link2SD or anything application which writes files here. But anyway, I found a simple fix for any such problems, and that’s if you get the read-only file system error when installing or updating the SD-Ext in the Link2SD, you can quickly repair this from the ADB Shell. If you have never used this before, here is quick reference and guide:

http://developer.android.com/tools/help/adb.html

Once you have this tool. But the phone into recovery mode, and then run the ADB shell from your command prompt:

adb Shell

Once you see the shell prompt, you can check and fix your sd-ext partition by typing following command:

e2fsck -fpDC0 /dev/block/mmcblk0p2

If fixing is successful, re boot back into phone and try using the Link2SD again.

Update: A quick tip on this (based on my personal experience). If you are using Link2SD and your frequently get the file system error on your SD-Ext partition, then one trick which worked well for me is to change the SD-Ext partition format from the Ext3 or Ext4 to FAT32. This should get rid of most of the file system errors happen during transfer of files.

Note: Some ROMs overwrite recovery at boot time so if you do not plan to immediately boot into recovery to install CyanogenMod, please be aware that this may overwrite your custom recovery with the stock one.

Though it was not a show-stopper as it gets fixed once I install the custom ROM, but what if you plan to use this recovery, but keep using the stock ROM. Fortunately, the solution for this is simple too. As mentioned above in the warning note, the Stock 2.3.6 ROM tries to restore the Recovery during the boot. The recovery backup is stored at the following path in System:
/system/recovery-from-boot.p

So, all you have to do to get rid of this automatic recovery overwrite is to delete this recovery backup file, and Android system will no longer overwrite. your custom recovery image. You can delete this file easily using ES File Explorer. If you have never used ES File Explorer, here is quick tutorial to do this:

1. Open ES File Explorer File Manager.
2. Select the menu button on your device and click on Settings.
3. Check the Up to Root option, then also check the Root Explorer option. When the prompt appears for root privileges, press the 4. Allow/Grant button.
5. Check the Mount File System option as well.
6. Go to the Root folder of your Android file-system i.e. “/” path.
7. Go to the “system” folder and long-tap on the recovery-from-boot.p file, and then delete it.

I hope you find this of help.

However, after a couple of days of exploring it, I decided to try to downgrade it back to Gingerbread (mainly because of the Camera issues). This step was even more simple than installing the Jelly Bean on my nexus one. The good thing was that I took the full backup of my Gingerbread before upgrading to the Jelly Bean (using ROM Manager). This backup folder had flash-able images of the system, boot and recovery partitions. So all I had to do to revert back the original version was to run couple of commands in the bootloader mode.

Here are the exact commands (for your info, and my future reference):

1. First you need to boot into bootloader mode. You can do this from key combination of your phone (for Nexus-One, it’s Power+Trackball down), or you can reboot into bootloader mode using the following adb command:

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adb reboot-bootloader

2. Wait for your cell to reboot in bootloader mode, and once you see it, test it by running following command:

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fastboot devices

If the above command lists your device, then you are good to go forward. Otherwise wait for few more second and/or check USB cable connection.

3. Once the fastboot mode is detecting the device, you can flash your Image and System flashable images using following commands:

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fastboot flash boot boot.img
fastboot flash system system.img

4. The next step is to simply clear your cache and user-data to avoid any problem with previous ROM data.

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fastboot erase userdata
fastboot erase cache

5. And at last, simply reboot your phone:

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fastboot reboot

If everything went well, you should be able to see your previous version without any problems.

First of all, please note that this is not a guide to how to install Jelly Bean on Nexus One. If you are looking for one, search on the web, and you will find dozens (if not hundreds). FYI, I read many, but referenced the following two mostly:
http://marian.schedenig.name/2012/07/22/installing-android-4-ics-on-the-google-nexus-one/
http://c2med.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-to-install-ics-nexus-one.html

Here are the mains steps I used:

1. Unlocking your Phone
It’s basically unlocking your phone bootloader. this is required because if your bootloader is locked, you can’t replace your recovery image, you can’t flash a custom ROM, and you can’t edit your system files. So we have to do this before the fun start. Here is a quick guide on how to do this (just follow the “Unlocking the device” section):
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_passion

Note: Unlocking the bootloader on a Nexus device will automatically wipe all device data.

2. Rooting your Phone
Once you have unlocked the Phone, the next step is Root it. Rooting is the process of allowing you to run your device with root-level permissions i.e. allow Superuser permissions. This gives you as a user to perform all the permissions including deleting the files required to run the system. While you normally wouldn’t do this, you can still do this. The main reason for Rooting is to give you additional control while in the Android to setup the Custom ROMs.

For the rooting, you can use either install the CyanogenMod custom ROM for your device (as in the above link), or you can try some application which exploits the Android OS vulnerability to root it. I tried the OneClickSuper application, and it worked for me. So you can try it as a simple alternative too. This application interface is quite straightforward, but if you have any confusion, there are plenty of tutorials available.

3. Install Custom Recovery
Recovery refers to the dedicated, bootable partition that has the recovery console installed. This is used to detect and load the Android OS from the main partition. Plus this also has supports some basic commands/options to restore your system in case of any problem. The stock recovery is pretty basic, and don’t have much options. Specially the stock recovery doesn’t allow you to do the installation of the custom ROMs and do backup/restore.

For installing custom recovery, there are two possible ways. If you like Geeky style, then you can do this manually by following this tutorial (follow the “Installing recovery using fastboot” section):
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_passion

There is also a simple way, that I followed, and that’s to install the CyanogenMod Recovery using ROM Manager. Here is very simple tutorial on this:
http://tech2.in.com/how-to/smartphones/how-to-root-and-install-custom-recovery-on-any-android-phone/280442

4. Partition you SD Card
The next step is to reparation your SD Card so that the applications can be installed on your SD Card. This way you can leave more RAM for the system applications. I think this is required (but not very sure) to install large size ROMs like Jelly Bean. Anyway, as this was simple process, I decided to do this anyway.

For this, again there are two ways. First is geeky way and it’s to use the 4EXTRecovery to install custom recovery and use it to partition the SD-Card. Here is a good tutorial on this:
http://www.roms-au.com/howtos/ext3/

Another, simple one is to create this partition using ROM Manager. Again, as I have the ROM Manager installed, so I use this option. Here is a tutorial for this:
http://theultralinx.com/2011/10/how-to-partition-your-sd-card-with-rom-manager.html

Warning: After doing the above step, I got the famous Android boot failure (Android with Exclamation sign). To fix this, I booted in to Recovery mode, and Cleared the User-Data. This fixed my problem.

5. Partition your Internal Memory (HBoot)
To Install the Jelly Beans or ICS, you need to first resize the internal memory (called HBoot). This is because the new ROM size for the JB or ICS is so big that it will not fit on the default partition created for the Gingerbread on Nexus One. Different ROMs require the different HBoot size. I was planning to use CM10.1 VJ Jelly Bean 4.2.1 and this requires 250 HBoot. So next step is to re-size the partition. This can be done by BlackRose.

Warning: In case after the above step you can’t load into recovery. You can fix this by flashing your recovery image again from the fastboot mode.

6. Install your Custom ROM
Once all the above is done, you are ready to install your custom ROM. For this download it, and place it on your SD-Card. If you forgot to do this (like I did) before formatting and erasing your system. You can mount the SD Card from the Recovery too (if you are using CyanogenMod recovery. Once you are in the recovery mode, do “wipe data/factory reset” and also wipe all paritions except the sd-card. Then select update from SD-Card, select the new ROM ZIP file. This should start the installer. Cross your fingers while it finish the installation and do the booting.

7. Results
If everything went well, then you will see your new Android OS. I’m using Jelly Bean and it’s really great. There are still few (but minor) display issues, but overall it’s fully functional. The best thing is that as soon as I signed in with Google Account, all my contacts and applications were restored. So, the system is back in running state in an hour or so.

8. Bonus
I like the new Jelly Beans OS and overall functions. However, I didn’t find the booting animation that cute (sorry CyanogenMod designer). Fortunately, there is simple way to change that too. Here is the one I tried:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=28025789&postcount=1

The setup is simple. Just download the flashable version of the animation. Place it on SD-Card. Boot to Recovery mode, and simply flash the new animation. Enjoy the new elegant animation.

Conclusion
If you try this, please do a very thorough reading of all the above articles (and any other articles you can find on web) before trying any of this. The key is to make sure you know what you are doing. If you are not sure, read more or post questions to experts (I’m not expert). Good luck!

This has worked well for years, but recently I enabled the Windows Desktop wallpaper rotation, and I noticed that this function randomly stops working. On debugging the issue, I found that when the wallpaper rotation is enabled, instead of loading the “SHELLDLL_DefView” window in the “Progman”, Windows was loading under the “WorkerW” window. BTW, the Spy++ Tool was great help in debugging all this.

Once I know what’s going on, the fix was quite easy. In case your are running into similar issues, here is the sample code which works for me:

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HWND GetDesktopListViewHWND()
{
  HWND hDesktopListView = NULL;
  HWND hWorkerW = NULL;
 
  HWND hProgman = FindWindow(_T("Progman"), 0);
  HWND hDesktopWnd = GetDesktopWindow();
 
  // If the main Program Manager window is found
  if (hProgman)
  {
	// Get and load the main List view window containing the icons (found using Spy++). 
    HWND hShellViewWin = FindWindowEx(hProgman, 0, _T("SHELLDLL_DefView"), 0);
    if (hShellViewWin)
      hDesktopListView = FindWindowEx(hShellViewWin, 0, _T("SysListView32"), 0);
	else
		// When this fails (happens in Windows-7 when picture rotation is turned ON), then look for the WorkerW windows list to get the 
		// correct desktop list handle.
		// As there can be multiple WorkerW windows, so iterate through all to get the correct one
		do
		{
			hWorkerW = FindWindowEx( hDesktopWnd, hWorkerW, _T("WorkerW"), NULL );
			hShellViewWin = FindWindowEx(hWorkerW, 0, _T("SHELLDLL_DefView"), 0);
		} while (hShellViewWin == NULL && hWorkerW != NULL);
 
		// Get the ListView control
		hDesktopListView = FindWindowEx(hShellViewWin, 0, _T("SysListView32"), 0);
  }
 
  return hDesktopListView;
}

Hopefully the comments should explain what’s going on very well. But if you still have any questions or suggestions, please do share with me.

On a side note, any wallpaper with icons turned off looks so beautiful. So I would recommend give this a try. So, if you are a programmer, which you most probably are if are reading so far, then better go ahead and implement this yourself. It will be a nice little utility. If however, busy with some other stuff, you can try my TaskbarExt application and get this in action quickly.

This can be controlled in PHP CURL via single line of code as shown blow:

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curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSLVERSION,3);

For more details on this, please check curl-setopt. Doing this in the ASP.Net was a single line of code as well, but finding it was not that easy. Here is the code which did the trick for me:

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try
{
	// Take back-up of current protocl and force use of only SSL3
	SecurityProtocolType activeProtocol = ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol;
	ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Ssl3;
 
	// The ASP.Net communciation (using HttpWebRequest) goes here
}
catch {}
finally {
	// Restore the orignal protocol
	ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = activeProtocol;
}

I hope this helps.