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I am looking for a tutorial, webcast or good book on developing VB.net applications for the Pocket PC. I am especially interested in using Pocket PC version of SQL Server and syncing the data with SQL Server. I am new to programming and have ben teaching myself VB.Net Windows Applications.
Any assistance will be appreciated.
Dan
Two books I have are:
SQL Server CE Database Development with the .NET Compact Framework by Rob Tiffany.
Also, The Definitive Guide to the .NET Compact Framework by Larry Roof and Dan Fergus.
The first one does a fairly good job of talking about SQL Server CE (as one might expect), and I tend to go to it as a SQL syntax reference. The second one wanders over many different topics. I have used it for several topics, some of which it covers in greater detail than others.
Basically though, the .NET CF is much like the regular .NET, with the major differences being in how you design a program to work on a PDA. The first book goes into a fair amount of style issues, and makes one really useful suggestion for PDA programming: Forms suck! They are too slow to load on a PDA for a good interface. The solution, as described in the book, is to put all of your screens into panel controls, and swap panels in and out of view. This works really well, and has the appearance of forms without the load cost of forms. For that alone, the book was worth it....but now you know, so you need some other reason to buy it.
i have found the best way to use forms is to have a controller class which creates an instance(Singleton Pattern) of each form while the splash screen is being displayed. then pass in a reference of this controller class to each form. now you will have no loading time assosicated with swapping forms.
That should work ok most of the time, but I wonder about it. The OS can unload resources as needed, and I would be afraid that the user would switch to other programs, and once they switched back my forms would be unloaded.
On the other hand, the form that I have (with all the panels on it) would be larger.
i am also developing my first mobile pc application. when i try to deploy it using the emulator, its working fine, but when i select the device (instead of emulator) in the debug dialog, its not working. its showing "system.objectdisposedexception" in the "initializecomponent" event.
what's the proble.
Can we assume that ActiveSynch is running properly and that the device is plugged in?