VB for hand-held devices

What's that language about development for Windows CE; its VB CE if I am correct? Where do I get started?

sathyaish Chakravarthy
Thursday, October 23, 2003

They used to have eVB, which was basicly VBScript on CE.  But the latest crop of devices have the .NET CF installed, not eVB.  So any VB for handhelds is now going to be done with VB.NET.

Flamebait Sr.
Thursday, October 23, 2003

Embedded Visual C++, Embedded Visual Basic, and I guess now they have the compact framework for CE, so C# as well.

I haven't tried C# on the device yet; eVB is a pig, and eVC is ... well, programming in C.

Alyosha`
Thursday, October 23, 2003

The problem I had, in CE 3.0 days, was that "embedded visual basic" actually used VBScript as the engine, not Visual Basic. VBScript only has one type, the Variant. This made it difficult to do real COM programming because you could only call Automation (IDispatch) interfaces. Some of the ActiveX controls that Microsoft shipped like the Windows Media Player did not have IDispatch interfaces. So you had to write C++ shims to connect your eVB applications to those controls. Ugh.

Joel Spolsky
Thursday, October 23, 2003

VBScript in general annoys me because I'm evidence to the contrary for Joel's assertion that good programmers will produce good code in VB in some small fraction of the time.  My C++ code is (according to my last review at work) great.  But every time I've used VB or Perl, it turns into an ugly mess. ;)

Flamebait Sr.
Thursday, October 23, 2003

Thanks for the informative replies, friends. Since I am only begining with it, so eVB is what I'll be looking for.

Flamebait Sr., thanks for the post. As for me, though I got to learn Java and C++, I have not much experience outside of Visual Basic and using it with the Win32 API and for me it works just superb.

Thanks a bunch, Joel. Haven't seen much of COM from under the hood, but I get the point. Its so nice of you to have spent your precious time on my post.

sathyaish Chakravarthy
Thursday, October 23, 2003

Also, you might consider checking out http://www.pocketpcdn.com/ for some useful information. ;)

Flamebait Sr.
Thursday, October 23, 2003

Oh! thanks indeed.

sathyaish Chakravarthy
Thursday, October 23, 2003

If I understand correctly, Embedded Visual Basic is an older variation of VB for handheld devices.  VB.Net (using the Compact Framework) is the latest, greatest offering from Microsoft for handheld devices. 

I haven't developed for handheld devices, but I really like developing with VB.Net for desktop applications.  You might want to consider that as an alternative to eVB.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/device/overview.aspx

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=039601c2d1c8%24a23b87f0%24a301280a%40phx.gbl
(Complete thread)

Robert Jacobson
Thursday, October 23, 2003

eVB is not the language to use. As Joel points out, it has weak typing. It also has no support for object design and many bugs.

If you need VB, use VB.NET by installing the .NET Compact Framework. Otherwise use C++, either eVC 3.0 or eVC 4.0.

.
Thursday, October 23, 2003

There's also AppForge, a Visual Basic like environment that uses the VB6 IDE on Windows to target Palm OS, Pocket PC, and Symbian devices.  It's a pretty good solution for what it does.  www.appforge.com

Ben Combee
Friday, October 24, 2003

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