hi
we acquired psion teklogix 7525 model and am supposed to develop an application to take meter readings. am used to develop desktop applications and this is my first application on a windows ce device. my idea was to make an application that load client information on the psion hand set where the meter readings can be inserted the download the the data from the handset to our computer. i have no idea where to start from.
am using vbnet 2005
any help will be appreciated
thanks
kikumu
The way I see it there are two ways you can choose to tackle the problem,
1) Either pre-load the information at HQ and then query a local database to make use of the usual CRUD functionality.
2) You might be able to make use of the web and web services (never used this tech on a mobile device to be honest so maybe someone can confirm) to retrieve only the necessary information on the fly. Basically, web-services would enable you to pre-program a couple of functions and store them on your web-servers (that must have access to your back-end DBMS). If you choose to develop using .Net technologies might be able to make use of ASP.net. If you have never dealt with web-services before this will facilitate the learning curve greatly. If I recall correctly VS will pretty much create your WSDL files automatically for you etc etc.
A third way (if you are using MS SQL) would be to sync your mobile database to your main database. There is plenty of information about this on Microsoft's TekNet. We have used this internally however I am not very pleased with this method at it relies on IIS, which is not exactly at the top of my "Favourite-Web-Servers" list.
Quick tip - If you intend to use a datagrid on the form of your application, I've found that if you bind it to a very large data source (3000-4000 rows) the device will struggle to load it all up.
Cheers.
Edit: what type of readers will you be reading? Will the reading be taken manually or will it be taken via some sort of connection?
Kenneth Cauchi