Betas

I've been getting a bunch of mail asking about this lately so here's a quick summary of what's going on with developer betas for mobile devices:

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 allows you to build .NET CF v1 apps for Smartphone 2003 and .NET CF v2 apps for Pocket PC 2003.  This is readily available and definitely worth checking out now.  The tools are much improved (WYSIWYG form designer, new emulator, ...) and Compact Framework v2 has a ton of great new features that customers have been asking for.

However, many of the new managed APIs that we've been talking about at conferences are not designed for generic Windows CE devices and are therefore not part of the Compact Framework.  Instead, they are specifically for the future versions of the Pocket PC and Smartphone platforms and will be a part of those SDKs.  So you'll have to wait for our next SDK to become available in order to use our new managed APIs for things like telephony, messaging, PIM, configuration, and notifications.  That said, I've heard a lot of excitement from people who want to get started on these as soon as possible - and we're excited about getting them in your hands as soon as possible.  More on how we're trying to make that happen later...

[Author: Robert Levy]

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 05, 2004
  Thanks for that clarification, it's pretty much what I'd assumed to be the case (see http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/kevdaly/archive/2004/07/05/18336.aspx), but it's reassuring to have confirmation.
  I'm really looking forward to those APIs, they should give device developers an early taste of the kind of universal (on the machine) civilised access to key information that we can expect from Longhorn (I'm thinking of the managed PIM API in this regard...I think it will be a useful gentle introduction to the kind of shift in thinking we'll need to work with WinFS on the desktop - shame there's no OPath :-)).
  As a matter of interest, how stable/feature complete is this version of CF2? Are there negative implications of installing it on a WM2003 machine (understanding that there is no Go Live licence as yet)?
• Anonymous
  July 05, 2004
  > The tools are much improved (WYSIWYG form >designer, new emulator, ...) and Compact
  I have to disagree there. I have installed Beta 1 and tried a simple C# SDE Windows app on three different PCs and three different PDAs. No deployment. Nothing. It's actually worse than the previews. I have filed two bugs.
  
  I'd rather see less list of features and more working bits...
• Anonymous
  July 06, 2004
  is it possible to install SQL Mobile (i.e. SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition) in a Pocket PC 2003 if one has Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 ?
• Anonymous
  July 19, 2004
  one would think you would have a hyperlink to the betas...
• Anonymous
  February 28, 2007
  we r developing an telephony application on windows mobile 5.0 using  .net cf 2.0.we r able to control the speaker phone volume but not able to control the headset volume.