Pocket PC Software Development

Pocket PC Development

Pocket PC development is interesting for us as one of the key differences is that resources are limited, but much less limited than when we started Windows development and you were lucky to have a whole 640k of memory on a PC. Sorting out things like SQL Server replication are also reminiscent of the early days of desktop Windows.

Strategic Use Of Tools

Microsoft originally released two development tools for the PocketPC. Embedded Visual Basic (eVB) is fast to work with, but uses a variant of VBScript rather than the full blown language, and this is somewhat limiting and very slow. For performance, Embedded Visual C++ is much better, sometimes 1000 times better, but of course is more complex to use and less forgiving. TGN has used both of these in combination in projects, and this gives a good strategy.

These days of course the .Net Compact Framework is the obvious choice, and the one TGN would be most likely to choose for future developments, using C# or Visual Basic. Having SQL Server available for pocket devices is very useful, but we've found that a lot of work needs to be done to optimize code for the kind of applications we've done where performance is critical. Doing things like caching results in memory rather than going back to the database improves speed by several orders of magnitude, and we've even written our own searching and sorting code to use with this cached data.

Project Or Module Development

The .Net implementation is a good solution, as although it doesn't seem to be quite as fast as pure C++ (at least on a Pocket PC), it is much better than eVB and if the extra footprint of the .Net Compact Framework is not a problem then it works well.

We've written applications which need to exploit the comms and USB ports directly, as well as 'tweaking' the user interface features in a non-standard way, so please let us know if we can assist you in your projects. We can implement whole projects, or just particular modules, or we can provide you with consultancy to help you do it yourself.