Porting a Windows Mobile 2003 compact framework app to smartphone

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Porting a Windows Mobile 2003 compact framework app to smartphone

I'm currently porting an app that was written for Windows Mobile 2003 (compact framework 1.0) and I've decided that my lowest denominator is going to be a smartphone running windows mobile 5. I've successfully got it compiling and running under VS2008 on "Professional" device but there is going to be a significant challenge to getting it working on a smartphone.

The problem I have as I need to replace TabControls, RadioButtons, buttons, and so on. I was wondering if there was any clever ways of doing this to cut down on the manual grunt work. Or at least some best practices for doing it.

+1 A:

There's no easy way of converting a normal Windows Mobile app to Smartphone, since (as you've noted) the smartphone addition doesn't have any clickable controls. I wrote one smartphone app a few years ago, and did almost everything with the two menus.

If I were you, I would get rid of the idea of making smartphone the lowest common denominator. I don't think there are very many phones out in the world anymore running the smartphone edition (I don't know of any personally, but there might be a few old ones still). If you go with the normal edition of Windows Mobile 5 and .Net Compact Framework 2.0, there's every likelihood that your application would work with Mono, which means it would work on the iPhone in addition to any WinMo 5+ device.

MusiGenesis 2009-10-22 23:38:29

I just bought a brand-new Dash 3G which has no touchscreen.

ctacke 2009-10-23 00:42:43

Unfortunately we do have a few clients running smartphones, one of which keeps reminding me about it. The number of users probably doesn't justify the expense of the effort, but I might do it anyway.

Alister 2009-10-23 00:43:10

@ctacke: I just remembered that my sister-in-law has a touchscreen-less WinMo phone also. Using it drives me insane, but I suppose it's better than an ordinary cell phone.

MusiGenesis 2009-10-23 01:27:12

@Alister: if I were in your situation I would probably just write two separate apps. If you shoot for smartphone, your users with clickable devices will wonder why they can't click on anything. Although if it's a well-designed UI, they might not complain. My phone is a Samsung i760 with a full physical keyboard and a full-size clickable PDA screen, and I still appreciate applications that I can use with just the two menu buttons.

MusiGenesis 2009-10-23 01:30:27

ansaurus

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Porting a Windows Mobile 2003 compact framework app to smartphone

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