Application Development for Windows CE

Question

I have a POS software and need to develop a collecting module for windows CE to run on a Honeywell Dolphin 6100 device.

I need to develop a simple application to run on a Honeywell 6100 device. This application should:

• Get a list of products (code, description and price) from my POS software
• Process Sales reading product's barcode showing Total due and number of items
• Upload that sale to my POS software (via network, files, or something like that)

What are my options? Are there any Application builder for Windows CE? If not what could I use to develop such application?

Answer 1

You have a few options, but few (if any) of them will allow you to create the application without writing code. I'm aware of no "application builder" products that will get you there in Windows CE, and I've been working with CE for some time. That's not to say some obscure thing might not exist, but I am not aware of one.

1. You can write your application in .NET - either C# or VB.NET are supported - using the .NET Compact Framework (CF). For that you will need Visual Studio 2008 Professional and really little else, other than a device. There are lots of tutorials and online resources for CF development, so I won't put in a list of them here.
2. You can write your application in C/C++. For this, again you'd want to use Visual Studio 2008 Professional. Yes, there are options that use other compilers, but if you want to spend time actually writing the app and not building up a development tool chain and figuring out how to get it connected and debugging, then Visual Studio is the route you want.
3. If you'd like a non-Microsoft solution, there are others that are supported to more or less of a degree. NS Basic has been around a long time, so it's probably pretty robust and has reasonable support. I've never used it, but I've heard good things about it from those who have.

Anything else and you're a bit off the reservation. Support will likely be minimal at best, tooling will likely not be robust, support, tutorials and all of the other goodness that developers often rely on to move forward will be scant. You can likely get any language working under CE, given enough time and resources, but the options above are the most likely to lead to success.