Different flavors of Windows Mobile 6

I recently began playing with the Windows Mobile 6 SDK and the first thing that you realize are there are 2 major flavors - Standard and Professional. Within these two flavors - there are more choices to make. Truly mind boggling!

Here is what I found from my research:

The first thing to realize is that there are 3 flavors of the devices that you can buy: Standard, Classic and Professional. Classic and Professional devices support touch screens, whereas Standard does not. If you wish to develop for the classic or the professional devices, then you need the professional version of the WM6 sdk.

The standard and professional devices are smartphones - support phone services as well as act as a PDA, the classic devices - are only PDAs. (If you are looking for a map from the old devices then basically the Windows Mobile for PocketPC platform is now the WM6 Classic platform and the old Smartphone platform is now the Standard and Professional WM6 platforms).

The good news is that even though there are two versions of the SDK, there is quite a large overlap over the libraries used and the installer created using any one of the SDKs can be used to deploy to all three types of devices.

Here is a summary of the different types of devices supported by the 2 versions of the SDK:

• Windows Mobile 6 Standard SDK (does not support touch screens, but supports phones)
  • Windows Mobile 6 Standard (176x220 pixels - 96 dpi)
  • Windows Mobile 6 Standard Landscape QVGA (240x320 pixels - 131 dpi)
  • Windows Mobile 6 Standard QVGA (320x240 pixels - 131 dpi)

• Windows Mobile 6 Professional SDK (supports touch screens - all versions except classic support phone services)
• Windows Mobile 6 Classic (240x320 pixels - 96 dpi)
• Windows Mobile 6 Professional (240x320 pixels - 96 dpi)
• Windows Mobile 6 Professional Square (240x240 pixels - 96 dpi)
• Windows Mobile 6 Professional Square QVGA (320x320 pixels - 128 dpi)
• Windows Mobile 6 Professional Square VGA (480x480 pixels - 192 dpi)
• Windows Mobile 6 Professional VGA (480x640 pixels - 192 dpi)

One can use either Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 for developing applications for WM6.

For code that will run on the device - there are two major ways in which you can create your applications:

Use native code for high performance, if you need direct hardware access, or if you require the smallest footprint. For native development, use Visual C++ to access Windows Mobile’s native APIs, as well as the Win32, ATL, and MFC frameworks.

Use managed code with the .NET Compact Framework for user interface-centric applications that require fast time-to-market or rapid application development. You should also use managed code if you want easy access to Web services or data held in SQL Server or SQL Server Compact Edition.  With .NET Compact Framework, you can use Visual Basic .NET or C# to access a healthy subset of the.NET Framework libraries.  Windows Mobile 6 ships with the .NET Compact Framework in ROM.

Useful links:

• Windows Mobile 6 SDK (refresh)
• Windows Mobile 6 Developer Documentation (has a very good set of the links to WM6 development - a point-and-click index to the key topics that make up the SDK documentation).
• Programming techniques for WM6
• Whats new in WM6 (PocketPCMag)
• Using SQL2005 in WM6 apps