Pocket PC Platform and .NET Compact Framework Enables Leading-Edge Data Analysis

MakeLogic found that the power of the Pocket PC and .NET Compact Framework was well-suited to their MicroGraphs libraries

It wasn’t just the fast CPUs and high-resolution color screens of Pocket PC devices that attracted Makelogic Product Manager Madanu Ujjwal Kumar, it was also the ease with which he could develop using the Microsoft® .NET Compact Framework.

And as a company that develops APIs, development tools, and applications for the various mobile platforms available today, Makelogic is in a good position to know what works and what doesn’t.

For their MicroGraphs charting libraries, that take full advantage of the high-resolution color screens and stylus-based interactivity on today’s mobile devices, Madanu found the Pocket PC and Microsoft’s .NET Compact Framework to be a winning combination. Initially targeting PalmOS devices using Java, Madanu and his development team found that transitioning from Java to Visual C#™ was “very gentle and easy”.

A Complete Package

“We were java developers earlier and so J2ME was our immediate choice to bring out a wireless product into the market. Then we tried out other platforms too,” notes Madanu. “The various tools like editors, emulators, debuggers, build tools etc are not all available from one single place for the other approaches, and therefore installing the individual components and configuring them to work with one another was a time consuming job. Later we were introduced to Visual C#. For my team Microsoft tools, the Visual Studio® .NET and .NET Compact Framework, were definitely easier to work with.” In fact, only fourteen days were required to upgrade an application from J2ME to the .NET Compact Framework.

Superior Development Tools

Once Madanu and his team moved over to Visual C# and the .NET Compact Framework, they were able to take advantage of NET’s leading-edge development features.

“We found the Pocket PC 2002 Emulator in Visual Studio .NET easier to work with compared to the other emulators and IDEs,” said Madanu. In fact, MakeLogic had no actual PocketPC devices during development. MakeLogic used just the Pocket PC 2002 Emulator to build their application in record time.

“We also found that the performance of Visual Studio .NET was far better than other IDEs– with their corresponding emulators plugged in.”

Madanu also noted that Visual Studio .NET’s integrated debugging support was “one of the best tools I ever used.”

Finally, the .NET Compact Framework supports floating point operations – valuable for data crunching applications such as MicroGraphs.

Data Mapping Made Simple

MicroGraphs on the PocketPC platform solves an important problem. Almost all industries have data to manage, and they all need to analyze data and show it to others in a quickly readable format. Graphs are the best solution. And when they are shown on a PDA with a color display it’s both helpful and effective.

MicroGraphs is a Windows® Control Library developed using the Smart Device Extensions of the .NET Compact Framework. It displays data in graphical form on a Pocket PC 2002 device. MicroGraphs supports Bar Graphs, Line Graphs and Pie Graphs. These components are designed so that they are totally customizable. They allow changing the color and display of various features like the Title, X-Label, Y-Label, background, color, etc., which are only a few of the 40 odd features they support. They also permit displaying more than one set of data at the same time. This helps in comparing the performances of various parameters depending on the factors that affect them.

PDAs come with a stylus. All the graphs of this library support intelligent stylus events. Tapping on a particular bar in the bar graph or a node in a Line Graph would show its value. All the graphs support many more stylus events which help toggling the display of Title, X-Label, Y-Label and the axes.

The Bottom Line

By developing MicroGraphs using .NET Compact Framework, Madanu and his team have made it easy for other developers to use their components and show the data from various sources like databases, files, internet or other apps, in graphical format.

Overall, the development experience was superior to other approaches. “It was easier to code in Visual Studio .NET using IntelliSense® technology and the other auto completion features of the IDE when compared to the other editors available in the market today,” says Madanu. “Also, the .NET Compact Framework being a subset of the .NET Framework, team’s expertise can be used in developing desktop apps too”

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