I am a (quite good) Visual Basic programmer and a (not so good) C++ programmer. What, in your opinion, is the best and cheapest way for me to develop apps for a Pocket PC 2003 device?
Let me add that I don’t currently have access to Visual Studio.Net 2003, just the Visual Basic.Net part. Since PPC2002 they have done away with the embedded visual basic route I believe?
The apps I will write will not be terrifically complex, not games for instance.
Any thoughts and advice would be appreciated.
There’s a downloadable runtime from microsoft that lets you run EVB-ppc2002 programs on ppc2003.
A few other good alternatives:
NSbasic/CE
$149.95 US
Really good IDE development based on a vbscript dialect.
http://www.nsbasic.com/ce/
CASL
$134.95 US including the pocketPC compiler.
Interesting, a little less easy to use than EVB or NSbasic in my opinion. Works with object store databases that are a little tricky to synchronize.
http://www.caslsoft.com/
Hope this helps you out.
chrisk I am grateful to you…
Since I posted I have found and tried the eVB runtime library route. It works, as you suggested, I just wonder if there is any significant limit to functionality by using an ‘earlier’ version in this way?
NSBasic looks great too, I shall download it and trial it.
It looks like one of the first apps I am going to have to develop is going to require receiving data via serial or Bluetooth, do you have any opinion on which option would make this easier?
Limits to functionality: None that I have found, but then I am an evb novice, really, and have had only limited access to a ppc2003 handheld. (My mom’s iPaq)
Serial or bluetooth: Both out of my depth… haven’t worked much with bluetooth, and the ppc-serial connection can be a bit tricky from what I know. What exactly are you trying to do - have the PDA communicate with your phone or something like that??