help a newbie

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.pocketpc (More info?)

I've got a [non leathal / highly irritating / difficult to pin down] food
allergy of some sort to which a friend of mine, who is a doc, has basically
told me needs to be kept track of and experimented with in order to be
diagnosed definitively. I.e., I need to track everything I eat and any
abnormal biological reactions I may have in order to to determine a
definitive correlation bewteen "food X" and "negative reaction N".

I'm a programmer by trade, and been using .net for the past couple years, so
my first instinct was to create a little .net app to help me track it all.
Problem is with interface - I rarely eat meals in front of my computer, I
need something portable that ins't a full-blown laptop. And while I've been
building my own networks, servers & workstations for years, I've never once
owned, let alone shopped for, a pda. And since the pda industry has been
chugging along for such a long time (relatively speaking), I'm up against a
lot of acronyms and technologies that I don't understand yet.

Now (AFAIK) at the top-most level of decision making there are essentially 2
choices: PPC or Palm, and I assume as a .net dev and as someone not at all
adverse to microsoft technologies that I'd probably interface with a PPC
more efficiently than with the Palm OS. Particularly if I were allowed to
write apps against the compact .net framework for a PPC - that would be
perfect (actually, that's the goal).

Looking for good online resources and especially any "just around the
corner" gotchas that might wanna make me holding off on buying now (i.e. new
screen or battery technologies that joe consumer (i.e. me) aren't aware of
on the horizon that I might want to hold out for). And product suggestions:
I know it's absolutely *got* to have wi-fi ability but beyond that, as long
as I can write my own app I don't care about much else - so a lot of the GPS
and media features are a bit superfluous for me. What kind of price ranges
should I expect? Anything else you wanna throw in... knowing what you know
now, how would you make your first pda purchase. TIA!

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.pocketpc (More info?)

On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 12:50:10 -0800, "23s" <asdf@asdf.com> wrote:

>I've got a [non leathal / highly irritating / difficult to pin down] food
>allergy of some sort to which a friend of mine, who is a doc, has basically
>told me needs to be kept track of and experimented with in order to be
>diagnosed definitively. I.e., I need to track everything I eat and any
>abnormal biological reactions I may have in order to to determine a
>definitive correlation bewteen "food X" and "negative reaction N".
>
>I'm a programmer by trade, and been using .net for the past couple years, so
>my first instinct was to create a little .net app to help me track it all.
>Problem is with interface - I rarely eat meals in front of my computer, I
>need something portable that ins't a full-blown laptop. And while I've been
>building my own networks, servers & workstations for years, I've never once
>owned, let alone shopped for, a pda. And since the pda industry has been
>chugging along for such a long time (relatively speaking), I'm up against a
>lot of acronyms and technologies that I don't understand yet.
>
>Now (AFAIK) at the top-most level of decision making there are essentially 2
>choices: PPC or Palm, and I assume as a .net dev and as someone not at all
>adverse to microsoft technologies that I'd probably interface with a PPC
>more efficiently than with the Palm OS. Particularly if I were allowed to
>write apps against the compact .net framework for a PPC - that would be
>perfect (actually, that's the goal).

If you have Visual Studio 2003 Professional, you can get a copy of the
Pocket PC 2003 SDK from Microsoft's web site. The .NET run time for
portables is called the Compact Framework (CF). It is definitely a
subset of .NET. I don't use .NET languages, let alone the CF, so I
can't comment more. But I _think_ even the CF will have enough for
your immediate needs.


>
>Looking for good online resources and especially any "just around the
>corner" gotchas that might wanna make me holding off on buying now (i.e. new
>screen or battery technologies that joe consumer (i.e. me) aren't aware of
>on the horizon that I might want to hold out for). And product suggestions:
>I know it's absolutely *got* to have wi-fi ability but beyond that, as long
>as I can write my own app I don't care about much else - so a lot of the GPS
>and media features are a bit superfluous for me. What kind of price ranges
>should I expect? Anything else you wanna throw in... knowing what you know
>now, how would you make your first pda purchase. TIA!

My first choice for a general intro would be Chris De Herrera's site:
http://www.cewindows.net/
Note that it has descriptions of device _and_ info for developers.

>

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