Stuck before i've even begun!

Hi everyone, some advice is desperately needed.

I want to create a simple application for a mobile/pda type device, it therefore seems I will need to develop for windows mobile or CE? The application itself is just a step by step guide to help people with some text, pictures and sounds which I may want to call from a database. But I want it to look pretty :)

So can anyone recommend how to get started?

The only program I am pretty good with is macromedia director but it appears shockwave or director files wont work with windows mobile or CE. Visual Studio seems to make it very hard to make any attractive applications. Then theres silverlight and windows presentation foundation which I know nothing about.

Hopefully someone who has worked on this before can just tell me what OS to develop for and what software to use!

Apologies for the long post, but thanks for reading

re: Stuck before i've even begun!

First things first, windows mobile and windows CE are different operating systems. You need to find out which one your application will be running on.

You will probably want to use Visual Studio (2005, 2008 if you are doing windows mobile 5 or 6) and use a language like c# or VB. net

MSDN has useful downloads for Windows Mobile 5 SDK and development tools etc.

As regards looking pretty, a lot of that will come down to your own design.

re: Stuck before i've even begun!

ok so i've got all the SDK's and visual studio. So will windows mobile applications run on windows CE as mobile is basically CE anyway.

This is confusing lol

re: Stuck before i've even begun!

hehe if only it was that simple.

Windows CE applications will run on windows CE... that's it.

Windows Mobile 5 apps will run on windows 5,6,6.1 devices

Windows Mobile/PPC 2003 apps will just run on Windows Mobile 2003

... annoying, I know, but that is the MS way. If it is truely a mobile application I would recommend developing for windows mobile 5/6 as they are the most popular mobile devices that Windows Make at the moment.

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