This book is an in-depth exploration into eVB's inherent features, and how to use them to solve likely mobile application programming tasks. After reading the book the reader will be able to write applications tackling a wide array of business problems for Windows CE-powered devices, both customized and for PocketPC and Handheld PC products. This book will help ease the transition into the language, and provide a reference for even more experienced developers.
Today, PDAs (personal digital assistants) are selling in large quantities. Pagers now have 386-processors, megabytes of memory, and power to run applications. Mobile phones have full GUI interfaces and can do far more than simply place a call. Technology, as always, is pushing for smaller and faster, and we're now in the age of mobile computing.
One major operating system for mobile computing is Microsoft's Windows CE, used on the popular PocketPC devices. Windows CE offers the look and feel of the desktop Windows environment and uses a robust set of programming interfaces from the desktop as well.
With the large numbers of these devices sold each month and the astounding number of Visual Basic developers out there, I was quite surprised when I began mobile application development with the limited amount of resources available on VB development for Windows CE.
I spent far too much time fighting and debugging applications, only to find that what I was trying to do was to be done in a completely different way or just wasn't supported at all. This book is a collection of knowledge that both Tim and I have gained from writing actual, real-world applications for Windows CE devices.
We've tried to avoid the mundane and simple stuff and focus on things that we feel have a distinct value in the programming community. Hopefully you will find the sample applications useful beyond what they teach you about the development environment.
