Windows Mobile 6 Development, alternatives to visual studio?

Question

I am looking to start writing apps for my Windows Mobile 6.1 professional device (Sprint Mogul/HTC Titan).

I use the copy of Visual Studio 2003 that I bought in college for all of my current contracting work, (all of my day job work is done on a company laptop). From what I can tell from MSDN in order to develop using windows Mobile 5 or 6 SDK I need to have at least Visual Studio 2005 Standard and I really don't feel like shelling out that much cash just to be able to develop for my phone.

Are there any free tools available to develop for Windows mobile? Or is there an affordable way to get VS that I am overlooking?

Answer 1

Even if you had Visual Studio 2005 you would be limited to the 2.0 Framework. You will need to use Visual Studio 2008 Professional or better to use the 3.5 Framework. But you also have an alternative.

I wrote an article on Windows Mobile Development without Visual Studio. The minimum you need is the .Net Compact Framework SDK. It comes with a command line compiler that can generate .Net assemblies that will run on a Windows Mobile phone. Naturally you will not want to use the command line for your compiling. So the instructions I wrote are centered around the (free) ShartpDevelop.Net editor. You can find the instructions on CodeProject.com. Here is the URL.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/mobile/WiMoSansVS.aspx

Answer 2

You can also use the free IDE SharpDevelop. They target .NET Compact Framework too...