Developing for the SmartPhone by Using the .NET Compact Framework

To develop for SmartPhone, you must install the SmartPhone support package for Visual Studio, which is available from Microsoft. By default, Smart Device Extensions for Visual Studio lets you create projects for the Pocket PC or the Windows CE platform. By adding the SmartPhone support package, the SmartPhone platform is added as an available project type.

Because the SmartPhone add-on is simply an extension for Smart Device Extensions, you get the same development experience when developing for the SmartPhone platform as when developing for Pocket PC or Windows CE. The major differences are that there are new emulators to deploy to and the controls not supported by the SmartPhone are ghosted out in the ToolBox. These controls are disabled:

• Button

• RadioButton

• ListBox

• TabControl

• DomainUpDown

• NumericUpDown

• TrackBar

• ContextMenu

• ToolBar

• StatusBar

• OpenFileDialog

• SaveFileDialog

• InputPanel

The major challenge in working with the SmartPhone is designing an effective user interface by using the controls available to you in the ToolBox. The power of the rest of the .NET Compact Framework is still available to you.

Miscellaneous SmartPhone OS Issues

It is important to be aware of differences in the SmartPhone file system compared with regular Pocket PC and Windows CE platforms. On the SmartPhone only the Storage directory is writable. Thus, all managed applications are deployed to the Storage directory, and you can write files only in the Storage directory.