Windows Devices

I recently took on a new project at work to build a custom scanning app for one of our customers.  It’s a brand new system, likely to be built on the Motorola (ex-Symbol) MC3090-G or MC90900G platform using either Windows CE or Windows Mobile as the base environment.

I’ve never worked on a mobile device, and the first three days has been something of an adventure.  I’d love to use Silverlight, but the 3090 doesn’t seem to support it.  I’d love to use the Microsoft Sync Framework 2.0, but it looks like that SyncFX 2 does not work on CE, and I’ll have to use 1.0.  I may end up spinning up my own sync processor since the database is dead simple (1, maybe 2 tables). 

What’s weird is that a year ago I was struggling as an early adopter to learn all new concepts for Azure, a new technology with little documentation and an unstable base.  Now I’m trying to use technology that’s been around for quite a while, and changes a lot more slowly than Azure and Windows Desktop, yet the process of learning is just as hard because the documentation all dates back to 2006-2007 and my gut says ‘don’t trust it, it’s old’.

So over the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging more about CE / Win Mobile.  Hopefully others will find this useful to get started, and maybe, just maybe, someone will read this, and be able to point me in the right direction.

Anyone at Microsoft need an early adopter for Windows Mobile 7 + Silverlight on a scanner?  Let me know.  I may consider it if I can’t figure out the other ways sooner than that.