This week I went with two colleagues to get certified in using the PreCom framework, which is developed by Pocket Mobile. So we spent two days at Vertica office in Ballerup, learning about the API and how to install and configure a PDA to run PreCom.

What is PreCom?

The PreCom framework consists of 5 building blocks on top of the Compact Framework. In decending order of importance they are: communication, storage, updates , logging  and hardware.

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Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working on new features for a PDA application which is build using the .NET Compact Framework. It’s the first time I have worked with the framework, and the first things I heard were not too uplifting. Jokes about it basically being a wrapper around NotImplementedException do make you wonder just how painful it will be.

I have to say though that it has actually been a pretty good experience so far! Maybe having the bar of expectations set just above groundlevel to start with makes it easier to make me happy – who knows?! I can conclude that debugging and deploying to the device has been smooth – just plug it in, press debug and you have all the usual debuggy goodness that Visual Studio provides.

The challange with .NET CF is that when making the framework smaller Microsoft really went in hard, so you will have to find alternate ways to get stuff done.