development tools

  • Thread starter Thread starter Fred Vanner
  • Start date Start date
F

Fred Vanner

I have used eVB to program a long line of PocketPC
devices. My latest device is an xda II (PPC2003). Since It
was stated that eVB would not offer support for this
platform, I (reluctantly) blew several months software
budget on VB .NET (Standard). On installation, this does
not seem to support .NET CF. I have since found various
hints on the MS web site that CF is only supported in VS
Pro and above (WAY beyond my reach!). Coming from eVB
(free download), I don't want to believe that support for
my PDA has just shot up to $1000+ (3x the cost of the
PDA). Should I just slit my wrists, or is there a cheaper
way to get a VB .NET CF development environment (I have
downloaded eVC++ v4, but I'm no C++ guru, and now I've got
this b****y VB .NET I'd like to use it). Any (printable)
suggestions??
 
There is no cheaper way, no. You must have Visual Studio, not a
single-language product, for .NET CF development.

PPC2003 *does* support eVB, but it doesn't come with the run-time components
installed. You'd have to add them to your target device(s). I believe that
this has been covered in the eVB newsgroup, which you can search with
Google.

Paul T.
 
Thanx for the prompt reply.
<sigh> I feared this was the answer - a dreadful
retrograde step for embedded product support (maybe MS
will see the error of their ways - SOON, I hope).
 
Not for VB, probably. C, the industry standard for embedded development
(there's a ;-) in there somewhere), is still free.

Paul T.
 
Not to prolong my whingeing beyond reason...
.... wasn't .NET supposed to provide the common RT
environment that made development less dependent on
language/target (and hasn't MS decided that C#, not C, is
the standard language for .NET development - another ;-) )?

BTW, while I can develop in eVB for PPC2003, I can't debug
(or even download from eVB). I have to build the app and
manually download it. If you go round the debug/modify
loop as often as I do this is a huge millstone! (OK, I
should get it right more often!)
 
Yes, but the idea that you'll be able to develop every single thing that
you'll ever do in a common-language run-time is a long way off in the
future. A *huge* percentage of the software out there is written in C and
C++, while a much smaller percentage is written in, say, Java. Given that
the OS is written in C and C++ (and it is, in this case), you can
immediately access any capability of the OS from C, while the run-time for
..NET CF has to catch up before you can do that. Hence, P/Invoke. If you
don't know how to program in C, you're trying to work with one hand behind
your back and dark glasses on. You may choose, because of the rapid
application development, Web Services support, etc., to use .NET CF and
either VB.NET or C#, rather than something like C, but then you'll be making
the choice based on something that affects your customer's happiness, rather
than on a limitation on your own capability.

eVB is an option for working code and you should be able to debug on a
PPC2002 and then run it on 2003.

Paul T.
 
Ah! If I had CUSTOMERS I might be able to afford VS Pro!
My embedded programming is on my home PC, mainly for my
own consumption, and eVB has been fine for my needs - with
occasional API Lib imports (and, as you say VB.NET would
have P/Invoke for any occasional extremity). Actually,
I've written more C/C++ than I like to recall (I'm a
systems engineer now - I get other people to write the
code!), but mainly under UNIX; it's not C/C++, but the
huge WinAPI that I don't really want to struggle with all
the time!
 
Actually, not all hope is lost. Check out the articles at
http://www.ward.nu/computer/teletekst/compile.html and
http://dotnetdn.com/without-visual-studio/ . As they point out, the
only actual requirement for developing using the Compact Framework is
the version 1.1 SDK. You could then either use the PPC 2003 emulator
for testing, or perhaps set up some sort of a batch file/script to
handle building and copying your executable to your PocketPC (using a
utility such as Remote CMD -
http://www.yetanotherhomepage.com/j7xx/software/util/rcmd.html ).
After that, it should be just you and whatever your favorite
development environment is (the VB.Net IDE or otherwise). Granted,
this means some extra initial setup work, but it has the advantage of
being free and (reasonably) workable.

Hopefully this'll give you some ideas that will prove useful. Oh, and
one other thing - Academic pricing on VS2K3 is a lot more reasonable,
so that might be something to look into if you've got any eligibility
there.

Hope this helps!

Mark Erikson
http://www.isquaredsoftware.com
 
Not sure if this is still useful, but I've just tried out the
instructions at http://dotnetdn.com/without-visual-studio/ and it
works a dream.

The only difference is that I obtained the cab files from my trial
version of Visual Studio 2003. I do have the C# version, but
annoyingly this didn't support the CF. I had to move to embedded to
write a few little apps for myself - now I can go back to .Net

Gordon Moore
 
Back
Top