Migrating .NET applications to Windows CE

22. March 2012 12:05 by Mrojas in VB6 Migration, Windows CE, Windows Mobile  //  Tags: , , , ,   //   Comments (0)

If you have a .NET application and then find that you need to move your application or
part of it to a Handheld or mobile device based in Windows CE don't worry.

The .NET has what is called the .NET Compact Framework which is in general
.NET for mobile devices. However review some info before you start your development
because it is not necessary the same. 

 

Differences between .NET Framework and Compact Framework

The CF is great but... it is not the .NET Framework. There

are differences take a look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2weec7k5.aspx

 

Controls

For a list of .NET Compact Framework Controls

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Compact_Framework_controls

 

Some nice Third Party .NET Framework Controls are:

  • http://beemobile4.net/products/ipack/controls
  • http://www.resco.net/developer/mobileformstoolkit/overview.aspx

Some useful links:

Need remoting in .NET well you should know that CF does not provide Remoting but there

is company that implements it:

http://gotcf.net/

 

You can also use DCOM

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/13819/Bringing-DCOM-remoting-functionality-to-Windows-CE

 

And for BlueTooth

There are several aproaches for developing BlueTooth with .NET.

1)  Bluetooth programming with Windows Sockers. 

See: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa362928(VS.85).aspx

2)   Windows Embedded Source Tools for Bluetooth.  

See: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/develop/windows-embedded-ce-6-bluetooth-technology-source-tools.aspx

3)    3rd party solution, A nice library is:

See: http://inthehand.com/content/32feet.aspx

Windows Services in CE

See this post: http://bansky.net/blog/2008/04/services-for-windows-mobile-in-managed-code/ 

and the library is available here:

http://managedserviceswm.codeplex.com/



 

Migration of Point of Sale (POS) Applications to Mobile/Tablet Devices

22. January 2012 23:54 by Mrojas in HTML5  //  Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,   //   Comments (0)

A long time ago, I had the idea of writing a series of posts about the issues
related to the migration of Point Of Sale applications developed in VB6.
(http://blogs.artinsoft.net/Mrojas/archive/2007/05/07/Migration-of-VB6-POS.aspx)

 A lot of companies developed this kind of software in VB6, and they faced a lot of
of similar issues specially when dealing with POS devices.

 

It's nice that the industry has made the effort of developing standards as the UPOS or
Unified POS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnifiedPOS) and Microsoft also did a great work
by providing the COM and .NET implementations.

 

It was nice to move VB6 applications to POS for .NET, but times have change and so
has the UPOS grown to interesting proposals like WS-POS.

 

"The fundamental benefit of WS-POS is the ability to provision POS peripherals as
services that can be accessed by remote POS applications, including mobile POS
solutions. Retailers can then use the power of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
to allow access to their existing peripherals anywhere in the store through these
services. WS-POS holds potential benefits for all members of the retail ecosystem." from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-pos-retail/index.html 

 

So you can now think about leveraring your VB6 POS to Silverlight or HTML5 and
consume WS-POS services to provide for example tablet-based implementations.
Imagine your POS application running in Silverlight or WinFX on a Windows 8 Tablet
or in HTML5 in iPads or Androids. Does it sound appealing? Well that is exactly the
kind of experience that our migration solution brings to the table.

 

 

 

You can download a working implementation of WS-POS from the  Association for Retail
Technology Standards (ARTS) web site.
Go to http://www.nrf-arts.org/arts_download/schema-non-member
Download the UnifiedPOS 1.13 pdfs and reference implementation from the
WS-POS Addendum link (http://www.nrf-arts.org/download/file?f=http://www.nrf.com/Attachments.asp?id=30476&rid=227810) There are Java and WCF implementations. It is also very easy to modify the WCF
implementation so it can receive and respond JSON and work with your HTML5 implementations.

I always appreciate feedback, so if you have any more toughts or questions about HTML5 or Windows 8 POS implementations just let me know.