How to start developing for Windows Mobile (part 1)

 

So, you just bought a brand new Windows Mobile phone* and got a killer idea for application,you would like to have. But … how to create it? Well, there is a very simple way, and it’s called .NET Framework. But, let’s go step-by-step.

OK, if you’re already familiar with developing with .NET Framework, skip this part. For those, who are first time here, lets start with basics. You will need Visual Studio, but unfortunately Express version is not enough (which is, by the way, totally free). Sure, you can develop everything using command line compiler, but if this is first time meeting with Windows (or Windows Mobile) development, I do not recommend doing that :)

Here we need to clarify some basic stuff, how actually .NET Framework works. I am not going to explain in details, but basic idea is, that you have a framework, which takes care for all basic stuff (like pointers, possible overflows, garbage collector, and so on). On top of that you have quite huge library for doing almost everything (eg. if you need to do some image manipulation, you just call appropriate library and don’t need to bother how it’s done). If you would like to know more, read about it in Wikipedia or a little bit shorter version here.

After we’ve acquired the development environment, we need to configure it. It depends which version you got, but with my installation of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, I didn’t get SDKs for the latest Windows Mobile platform (which is in time of writing SDK for WM 6.5), so you can download it from Microsoft Downloads. There is pretty big mess about those SDKs, DTKs, DRKs, so I’m recommending to stop here about that.

We’ve now pretty familiar with basic concepts, except one thing: On mobile devices we have .NET Compact Framework (CF), which is scaled down version of full .NET Framework. In fact, there are some class libraries in CF, which are not present in full version,eg. InputPanel. But all basic stuff is in CF, so no worries, that you don’t have String or something like that basic missing :) And why we don’t have full version on mobile devices? Now, that’s obvious – lack of space. Most of today’s devices have something between 24MB to 1GB of internal storage. And that storage can get very quickly filled up :) So, CF version is shrunk to about 5MB, while the full version is about 200MB.

And the last thing for part 1 – and the most important – you must be aware, that we have a lot of different devices running Windows Mobile. That also means, a lot of different specifications (eg. screen size, screen orientation, available memory, etc.). But wait, it gets even better – there are two major versions of Windows Mobile, which are different in it’s core functionality: touch screen devices and non-touch screen. Microsoft is calling first PocketPC and the second Smartphone. But not anymore. Since Windows Mobile 6.0 Microsoft changed names (yeah, we all know about that Microsoft tradition, right? :) ), so the touch is now Windows Mobile Professional and non-touch is Windows Mobile Standard.

In part 2 we will take a look how to create Hello World application and we will see, how to detect running platform and create platform independent application. 

* Oh, and by the way, you don’t need actual device to start developing, you have including emulators – what we will see in part 2.

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author: Aleš Rosina | Comments: 0 | Tags: windows-mobile, visual-studio, developing, series