I've been trawling the net trying to determine how best to approach this. I'm needing to write an application which is original for Windows Mobile 6.1 but my expectation is that it will need to also run on version 7 and later.
The application needs to interface with a database, but as connectivity is intermittent, it will need to work in a disconnected mode and will resynchronise when the user is back in range and submits the changes.
I currently have Visual Studio 2010 professional and would ideally like to work within this IDE but this is flexible. The database is hosted on a SQL Server but version may be 2005, 2008 or 2012.
Can anyone provide suggestion on approach?
many thanks
Matt
You're going to have some big challenges. First, to target WinMo 6.x, you must use Studio 2008 Pro (or Ultimate). Studio 2010 cannot target these devices.
Second, binaries from from WinMo 6.x will not run on a Windows Phone 7 (if that's what you mean by "7") device at all. UI code is 100% non-portable as well.
The next version of Windows Embedded Handheld (what WinMo 6.5 is called) hasn't been talked about much, but based on what MS has been doing, I'd suspect it's going to resemble Phone or Surface a lot more than the older versions of WinMo. Business logic will port, but UI almost certainly won't.
So my suggestion would be to install Studio 2008 and then make sure you have really, really good model/view separation in your code base, and interface the hell out of everything to improve your odds of being able to port when the time comes. You'll be skipping Studio 2010 and going right to 2012.
** EDIT **
Microsoft just confirmed my suspicion today that the next version of Windows Embedded Handled will, indeed, be based on the Phone 8 platform, so you can start developing now using the Phone 8 SDK.