Developing Mobile Applications (Part I)

Part I: Pre-requisites and installation.

Hi, in this series of posts we are going to explain how to develop data Mobile applications. The selected platform was Visual Studio 2008 Team System Edition + C# + Windows Mobile 6 + Pocket PC Device Emulator (we don’t have decided the deployment hardware yet).

First of all let enumerate the required software:

• Microsoft Visual Studio Team System SP1.
  • Compact Framework 3.5 (Included)
  • SQL Server CE 3.5 (Included)
  • Microsoft Device Emulator V3 (Included)
• Windows Mobile 6 Professional Software Development Kits Refresh
• ActiveSync 4.5
• MyGeneration 1.3.1 pre-Alpha

Brief description of each component:

Visual Studio                 

We need any Visual Studio which edition supports smart devices development; we can also use Visual Studio 2005 (standard or professional edition). When installing do not forget to check the Smart Devices section. Remember we need the SQL Server Compact Edition and the Compact Framework.

Windows Mobile SDK      

For developing Windows Mobile 6 application we need to install the SDK because this is not included in Visual Studio 2008 Team System. This SDK includes devices images for the emulator, documentation, samples, etc… If you need instead of SDK for WM 6 you can install the Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Tool Kit from here.

Microsoft ActiveSync 4.5

ActiveSync acts as the gateway between your Windows-based PC and Windows Mobile-based device, enabling the transfer of Outlook information, Office documents, pictures, music, videos and applications to and from your device. If you are only going to use the device emulator only or you don’t have the real Pocket PC yet, you don’t need to have installed ActiveSync; ActiveSync connects the real device with your pc. Download from here.

Note: Microsoft ActiveSync Works up to Windows XP SP2 version. If you have Windows Vista you should use Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 available from here.

MyGeneration          

MyGeneration is an extremely flexible development tool written in Microsoft .NET. MyGeneration generates code from templates that can be written in C#, VB.NET, JScript, and VBScript. MyGeneration is great at generating ORM architectures or O/R Mapping files for architectures such as Gentle.NET, Opf3, NHibernate, and others. The meta-data from your database is made available to the templates through the MyMeta API. MyGeneration supports a lot off databases systems including SQL Server CE.

Note: For using MyGeneration with SQL Server CE 3.5 you must install the latest version (now 1.3.1 pre-alpha) or MyGeneration will not connect to 3.5 CE database. The “hard way” is downloading the source code of MyMeta.Plugins.SqlCe.dll plug-in, first open it with VS 2008 so all the references to previous SQL Server CE are updated, then compile the library and replace it in the installation folder of MyGeneration.

OK! Now where are ready to start our mobile project.

And we can deploy it to a Pocket PC running Windows Mobile 6

This entry was posted on 08/06/2009 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.