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Joe Bulleit
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What is the best development platform for Mobile Devices and Windows?

The company I work for is venturing into developing their own software for hand held devices.  The devices are from Intermec and have Windows Mobile on it.  I would like to try and find a development platform that allows for developing apps for the Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Windows CE.Net, and Windows XP/7.

Can anyone give me some pointers on this research?  A friend of mine told me that Android and Blackberry use Java; so Eclipse is a possibility, but from what I have seen Windows Mobile devices pretty much require Visual Studio Dev Platform.

Can anyone shed some light on this subject?  I need an answer this week if possible.  Also, if anyone responds, can you give me some reasons you are using that platform?  I know this is subjective; but it would help me figure out what to research instead of the ton of stuff I found on Google.

Thanks in Advanced.
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Joe Bulleit

8/22/2022 - Mon
alexey_gusev

first of all, there is NO dev platform that covers all OSes you've mentioned. Even though BB & Android use Java, it's not exactly the same Java :)
You can use Eclipse for these.

For iPhone you have to have Mac with Intel CPU, there is no other alternative (unless you count some offers that take your preudo-code and actually compile it for iPhone).

MS Visual Studio would be OK for WinMo, WinCE, all Windows desktop development - first 2 require Standard edition at least.

Java (J2ME) would work on WinMo (and eg GMail for WinMo is implemented in J2ME), but for me personally it's not that convenient.

I'm sure you'll get here much more feedback :)
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Mikal613

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TheRealLoki

Use Visual Studio 2008 (or 2005 if you can't afford) for Windows Mobile/Pocket PC development.
Visual Studio 2010 does not support mobile development (yet)

For all the rest, use Titanium
http://www.appcelerator.com/

titanium has been approved by apple, and compiles to "native" for many platforms
It's still fairly new, but has a lot of users already

C# .Net is more widely used for Window Mobile, so it's the best choice.
If you need speed, use Embedded C++ (search for the free download of "Microsoft Embedded Visual C++ 4.0)
it's harder to develop with, since it doesn't come with a WYSIWYG Gui, and there are some things it can't do (due to not being "managed")

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Joe Bulleit

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Great input.  Thank you.
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