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Homebrew Webserver Available For Windows Phones

If you’re holding a Windows Phone and want to peruse your /Windows or Isolated Storage directories from as a webserver then Dave Amenta has a solution for you. His Homebrew Webserver lets you open your web browser, browse your Windows Phone files and even download them to your PC. The /Windows directory has some interesting things in it. There are shortcuts to change the USB settings (yeah that led me to lose the ability to connect to my PC for a short period but it was all good in the end but I’ll likely go back and try some more of them). The settings for various carriers are located there. There are plenty of .exe files that you can’t do anything with (but visualvoicemail.exe I not present) and there are some XAPs located there. It seems like these are the version of the XAP that was available at launch and preinstall with the phone (like the Samsung Now XAP is there), but if you download a new Samsung XAP it’s not there. These files can be downloaded but you can’t sideload them because of the manifest files that block it.

This is using native APIs and not HTC’s API so you do not have complete access to all portions of the phone but it does work for any Windows Phone regardless of manufacturer. It’s a fun toy for now but let’s see what happens as more people dig and extract files and we get access to more portions of the phone. I’ve had some fine times with this already fiddling around with files and checking what goodies xml’s have hidden inside.

Great project Dave (and jmorrill for some of the code), thanks for all of your help and I’m excited to see where this goes from here.

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