Last Developer Standing: Mobile!

So now you get to show how mobile your skills are.

It's been a while since we've covered mobile development at our MSDN events across Canada. And a lot of people don't know just how easy it is to build simple applications for Windows Mobile, Smartphone, and in general, Windows CE.

Go ahead, I dare you, create a smart device application. You don't need to have a pocket pc. The emulators are just the thing. And they run the reference roms that device vendors generally use. You're not simulating the OS when you run your app in the emulator, it's running on the real mckoy.

Now, there are some things the Compact Framework doesn't cover. Things like XSD (schema) validation, and XPath. You need to know the limitations of the compact framework to work with PocketPC. There's also COM interop. You don't get all the nice interop proxies or anything created for you. You need to resort to P/Invoke to call into the native Windows CE Operating System to do some stuff, with the current version.

You know, P/Invoke?

You might be more familiar with the dllimport statement, which you can use in C# to reference a native DLL on the platform. Well, because of constraints on memory on storage, some things just don't fit in the compact framework. So you should also be familiar with those things. And do you know what, that's ok. It's a mobile app!

Want more information? Check out a great site, PocketPC Canada! You can use this site as a gateway to great information, user's groups, etc. Check out the links.