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O2 XDA II programming information > Forums @ MTekk > MTekk:

To all.

I use Embedded Visual Basic (eVB) on my WM2003 O2 XDAII device without dramas. I've written several real world banking applications using eVB that run on my XDAII and iPAQ 5550. My apps use GPRS and WiFi to talk to a remote MS SQL 2000 database server and a remote MS IIS5 web server (executing ASP scripts). My apps also use XML. Support for internet comms is via the msxml.dll library that is already resident in the WM2003 ROM. I can also do FTP and SMTP/POP via the ROM dlls (of course I've written a lot of code that wraps the DLLs). My apps also read/write to a local MS Access MDB file (local to the PDA). There are also several DLLs out there that eVB can tap in to (via declares) - these DLLs do all sorts of neat stuff.

What I can't do is specific PDA stuff, like operate the camera, send SMS, answer an incoming call, etc.

* Yes, eVB is no longer supported by Microsoft.
* Yes, it is freely available from Microsoft.
* eVB has its own IDE interface that looks very similar to VB6.
* No, you cannot use VB6 to write the app then copy the EXE across to the PDA
* The eVB app, when compiled, runs on the PDA. However, you must install the free eVB runtime files (again, avail from MS website).
* Yes, there are numerous books and web sites providing sample source VB code for the eVB platform.

Of course, you can also program in C, C++ and VB.NET for the XDA. Microsoft's Embedded Visual Tools contains eVC and eVB - both free development environments, but no longer supported.

Cheers, Markus.