ChevronWP7: Now without the sideload limit.

It wasn’t long ago that ChevronWP7 was released, finally enabling everyone to take advantage of the Windows Phone 7 platform by running homebrew applications on it. Rafael Rivera said we could expect an update where the standard limit of 10 would be removed, though this sadly was not to be. After discussions, ChevronWP7 was discontinued, in favour of a homegrown homebrew solution from Microsoft.

However, that’s not here yet, and realistically, it won’t be here for some time yet, so thanks to XDA Developers, we can continue using ChevronWP7 for the time being.

However, as homebrew apps really start coming out, fitting them into that limit of ten is becoming a harder and harder task. So I decided to take to poking around inside ChevronWP7 with Red Gate’s .NET Reflector. Now, sure the assembly had been “secured” with Dotfuscator, but dotfuscator is one of the weaker obfuscators on the market. All that was used in ChevronWP7 was object-renaming and namespace-collapsing, so it wasn’t too hard to track down the necessary code. In fact, the necessary value was just one integer in the XML file the HTTP Server returned in response to a request from the phone.

From:
<a:AppsAllowed>10</a:AppsAllowed>

To:
<a:AppsAllowed>2147483647</a:AppsAllowed>

This simple piece of XML can be found in the (-.)bg.a(object, b8) method, as it is called in the assembly.

So without further ado, here’s a link to my modified assembly. I did modify the credits slightly at the bottom, so users can always tell whether they’re using the original 10-apps ChevronWP7, or my modified no-limits ChevronWP7.