Sunday, March 26, 2006

Programming the Pocket PC the easy way

While we are waiting for Delphi to support CF development officially, I found a year ago a very easy to use Form Designer application for 'programming' applications for Pocket PC's.
GrandaSoft's XSDesigner was at that time able to produce data collection forms (as they call it) in a very easy straight forwarded way which reminded me to the first 'Wows' after seeing Delphi 1 and it's way to deal with databases. :-)
XSDesigner let's you design database forms which save their data in a Pocket Access database (CDB format) . On the PDA you must install, a sort of runtime, XSForms which you can use to load your forms. One thing that was missing at that time was that you could not program button clicks and events.

Their new release (codename Matador), which is at this moment a public beta, supports now scripting languages to program logic in your applications. They support (for now) VBScript and JScript as languages and an event model. The way it is implemented is amazingly simple, but oh so effective.
Just design your form, script your logic, run it with one click on your Pocket PC, and it all works like magic!. The database is generated automaticly and data can be exported to several formats like XML and HTML.

Conclusion:
Although, it is limited to database forms, and it is limited, in its way, to work with complex datastructures, I find it extremely powerfull and recommend every one intresting in PDA development to give it try. According to their website there will be a free personal version and a professional edition with more features.

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