Mobility platforms -- Past, Present & Future ???

[LindaHewitt]

I am currently developing a presentation for a mobility application but I have not been able to find answers to several questions, such as:

1. What is the history of mobility application platform development?

2. Currently the platform for developing applications for the Pocket PC and the SmartPhone is CE 2003.

3. But what does the future hold (platform wise), when Visual Studio .NET 2005 is released this summer?

4. What does the future hold for development on the Palm platform.

I have not done any mobility development, so this is why I flying blind.

Any assistance that you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Linda

[Shaggy Hiker]

My understanding of the history is very patchy. I believe at first everything had to be written in a language such as C or C++. These wrote small and tight code, but were not particularly quick to develop with.

I believe somebody like AppForge (at least that's the name I remember) was the first to move a version of VB over to the Palm OS. On the Windows CE side, there was eVB, which was based on VBScript rather than the full VB used for normal apps. VBScript has many limitations.

Currently, with things moving to .NET, there is the .NET Compact Framework, which allows developers to use basically the same tools and language on a PDA that they use on a desktop. There are several limitations, but few are all that significant. The limitations are all because the Compact Framework had to be just that: Compact!

The near future is almost certainly a continuation of the same, with a .NET CF in 2005 etc. Unless the amount of memory in PDA's increases greatly, there will probably never be a full version .NET for PDA's. Of course, memory is almost certain to soar, so it could happen.

[LindaHewitt]

Hi Shaggy Hiker,

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,

Linda