Developing for the Motorola MC 75 smart device

I worked on a small application for the MC 75 handheld device from Motorola this week. The device sports Windows Mobile 6.5 and .NET CF 3.5 and you can use v 2.6 of the symbol EMDK to access the barcode scanner and other goodies.

It was quiet a experience hammering out a app in 2 days considering the last time I worked on windows mobile was when Visual Studio 2005 was the hot new thing and I was the envy of developer brethren for getting upgraded to it. I ended up spending 70% of time setting up my environment and getting the "hello world" or "howdy world" app on the device.

I never realized that Microsoft cut off support for Windows Mobile when it launched the Windows Phone 7 platform in the Visual Studio 2010. They still support the old versions of VS if you have them for smart device development. This was a bummer as getting an older version of a microsoft product can be a pain in the ass.

This is what I did to get the env setup on a Windows 7 (64 bit) machine:

1) Install the trial version of Visual Studio 2008. ( you could buy it too if you wanted to)

2) .NET Compact framework

3) Microsoft device center, this was way cooler then Active Sync.

4) Symbol EMDK ... I used 2.6 for C#

The actual device is pretty cool but getting the Wi-Fi to work was not as straight forward as you would expect. I finally got it to work after reading the blog post and first comment from Michael.

I hope that the smart devices from Motorola ( and Symbol) move either to Windows Phone 7 (or 8) or get on to the Android bandwagon. Windows mobile 6 with the .net compact framework was awesome but its time has passed and I really dont want to code on that platform again.