How To Develop Windows Mobile Applications on Windows 7

Tasked with developing an application on a barcode-scanner running Windows Mobile 6.1, specifically this device, I started down the development road.  This blog post is about my encounters, and will hopefully help you avoid the pitfalls, and have you off to development as quickly as possible.

First you'll notice that Visual Studio 2010 doesn't support Windows Mobile projects.  That may be the end of story for some of you right there as there are no workarounds.  But, if it's not, and maybe you have an MSDN license, you'll need to use Visual Studio 2008 Professional (intentional use of the word Professional here).  Of course when installing VS2008 Professional, make sure you do a full install, or at least select the mobile development parts you'll need for the install.

Okay, once VS2008 is installed, you're ready to develop a simple application.  For an excellent example on how to get started with a hello world, here's one from Microsoft.

If you need your application to actually connect to anything (who'd have thunk it?), you'll need to configure your device (or emulator) for network connections.  Note, this is not done by default even on the emulator.  First step is to install the "Windows Mobile Device Center" as a free download from Microsoft.  If you should get a happy "Device did not install correctly" error message during the install, feel free to ignore it.

Once you've installed the device center, there is an excellent tutorial from Microsoft here on how to setup "sync" between your device (or emulator) and your computer.  With sync setup, your device will automatically use your computer's internet connection.

With the network connection setup, you should be ready to start development!

As a side note, if connecting to a MySQL database, you can use the latest framework (3.5) and the latest version of the MySQL connector (6.3.0 at time of writing), and it will work just fine.  If you do encounter an exception from the MySQL Connector however, there is a chance that it will not have a meaningful message associated with it as it may be missing the string resources...