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Star Wars day is coming... and interesting Survey on CodeProject...

Star Wars day is coming... more on this next week, also WinHEC is running in Seattle next week http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winhec/default.mspx - hopefully see you there...

I'm signed up to CodeProject who recently passed the 1 Million signed up users mark (congratulations guys!) - Code Project run a survey, the results are sent out with the CodeProject newsletter, todays newsletter contains a survey about mobile devices... It's interesting to see the percentage of owned devices containing .NET Compact Framework - it would also be interesting to see how many of those owners are writing .NET Compact Framework code...

What types of PDA do you own?

Option Votes %
PocketPC / Handheld PC (No .NET compact Framework) 147 22.4
PocketPC / Handheld PC (.NET compact Framework enabled) 261 39.8
PalmOS based Palm / Visor 191 29.1
RIM Blackberry 11 1.7
SmartPhone 71 10.8
Cellphone with Java 120 18.3
Smartwatch 8 1.2
Psion 22 3.4
Responses 656  

(This was a multiple choice question. Totals may not add up to 100%)

Posted: Wednesday, April 28, 2004 8:23 AM by mikehall

Comments

ed said:

CodeProject is almost exclusively for developers using Microsoft technologies. Is it any suprise the #1 PDA would also use Microsoft technologies?

Thats like going to www.palminfocenter.com and using their statistics to judge the market.
# April 28, 2004 8:45 AM

Mike said:

Hi Ed,

I was more interested in the fact that more Pocket PC devices are shipping WITH the .NET Compact Framework than without, and am curious to discover how many of the owners are writing managed code compared with native code.

- Mike
# April 28, 2004 8:50 AM

Aaron Lewis said:

I have one with Mobile 2003 and the .NET CF installed. I spent about a day after getting it playing around with the tools in Visual Studio .NET and stuff. I ended up coming to the conclusion that if I was going to write any kind of code for these devices, and especially if I didn't only want Windows handhelds running it (from a narrow market to narrower), I'd be better off sticking with mobile web pages.

I guess if I were going to write an app and I only wanted to target Windows Mobile users, I might go with the fat client approach. Can't see those criteria coming up any time soon, though.
# April 28, 2004 11:59 AM

Mike Kozlowski said:

I bet a lot more of them would write apps for it if it didn't require a full Visual Studio installation. I've got a handful of little tasks that I'd love to be able to do with a PDA -- and if I could just use the .NET SDK, I might even write some of the little apps I'd like; but I'm not going to spend umpty-hundred dollars buying myself a home copy of VS for that kind of puttering.
# April 28, 2004 12:35 PM

Mike said:

as far as "Fat" applications vs. web based applications this very much depends on whether you have connectivity or not, in some cases you may not have any data connectivity until the end of day, in which case you want local storage and local applications which is one of the reasons for technologies such as SQLCE, giving you the ability to sync your enterprise data down to the device, modify during a working day, or add new records (barcode scanning, parking tickets etc...) and then re-sync the data at end of day.

There's a trial version of Visual Studio .NET Professional which gives 60 days access to the tools - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/trial/default.aspx - this includes the tools needed to write applications for mobile devices.

- Mike

# April 28, 2004 3:43 PM

Mikel Berger said:

Here's a link to an article explaining how to develop for the compact framework without Visual Studio.

http://dotnetdn.com/without-visual-studio/
# April 28, 2004 4:04 PM

Mike said:

Now that's cool - Mikel, thanks for passing the link over.

Mike, now's your chance to get out there and start writing .NET CF applications...

- Mike
# April 28, 2004 4:17 PM

Mike Kozlowski said:

Mike Hall: That's really nice for evaluation purposes, but for the kind of little, now-and-again things I'm talking about, wouldn't help.

Mikel Berger: Um, yeah. That sounds a bit on the dodgy side for me.

I'm just curious if there's any reason why there is no free .NET CF SDK -- is the thought that it wouldn't be practical to develop CF apps without VS, are there technical challenges, what? Because it very much seems like it's in Microsoft's best interests to put it out there, so it's odd not to see it.
# April 28, 2004 4:28 PM

Jono's Blog said:

# May 1, 2004 10:38 PM

Steve WWW said:

I have a Visual Basic.NET 2003 "Standard" Edition, installed in my desktop with Windows 2000 Professional. I would like to install the ".NET Compact Framework" and try developing the Pocket PC application. Would you please tell me if it is possible? Please detail how can I do it. Thank you in advance.
# May 6, 2004 10:35 PM

Mike said:

You need Visual Studio .NET 2003 professional or above to develop .NET Compact Framework applications in the development environment, otherwise you could follow the instructions given by Mikel (above).
# May 6, 2004 10:45 PM
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