Database Users

Coders new to WM5 "help" (advice)

Hi,
I have a fair background in various coding languages, and there are a couple of programs I want to try and build.
However, while I can usually pick up and understand a language quite easily the problem I usually find is a lack of knowledge of the objects available to make life easier and the functions which are available.
So far, I've sat around and got a setup which I think should allow me to write and compile WM5 applications and today plugins, but I have suddenly found I am missing that "thing" that made writing in other languages easier - effectively a "Cheat Sheet".
What I would appreciate from the other coders with experience in writing software for WM5 is a list of what windows or books you have open for reference when coding. Is it just MSDN, is there a specific page that you have bookmarked or do you just google for it every time?
Any further advice (like good compilers I might have missed) will also be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

I'd like to hear from others too about this..
So far, My buddies for development help have been:
1. Search in MSDN
2. Search in Google
3. Ask on xda-developers
4. Search in MSDN forums and usenet groups for pocket pc developers
5. A book (that i dont refer to too often) whose name goes smthing like "Programming for Microsoft Windows CE .net" by Douglas Boling (Its not for .net development, it covers native development mostly. Windows CE .Net refers to a version of CE)
6. I also have another book that i have not even opened till now. It is solely for .net development (which is not my forte). Its by Wrox Publishers. If I remember the name correctly, it goes smthing like "Professional Microsoft Smartphone Programming"

There is an exellent documentation on .NET & Native Code on MSDN.
Then there are samples as well, again on MSDN.
For a today plugin, there is a very good sample by levenum which u can easily find in this section of the forum.
For me its always been google & this forum, no boooooks !!!

or
www.codeguru.com
in most cases programming for pocketpc's is like programming for pc's

Thanks for the replies guys. I see what you mean, MSDN is rather good. I was beginning to think it was just WM6, but I eventually found the section on WM5 (which I am planning on coding for given my phone is WM5). Their Wiki also had some good info on it too. Don't know whether these will be my coding buddies yet though....
shantzg001 said:
I'd like to hear from others too about this..
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Click to collapse
I'm glad someone else is interested. TBH I am surprised there is not a sticky at the top of the forum with this information in or a link to the Wiki for further details, but I could only find details of Development Tools on the wiki.
shaileshashar said:
For a today plugin, there is a very good sample by levenum which u can easily find in this section of the forum.
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Click to collapse
Thanks for this pointer. I found two (here and here) which look promising. Don't know if there are any I missed....

Just a small tip when searching in MSDN... add ce in the search pharse. For e.g., "ce WM_TIMER" will give you the CE related sessions at the top.

I like www.pocketpcdn.com - articles and code examples for Pocket PC and Smartphones arranged by categories.
Also www.codeproject.com has been helpfull at times.

Simulating Tabs layout with App Inventor

I've been using Eclipse to go through the tutorials on the main Android dev site and tbh it's all a bit too much and things don't work and I've no idea why. For example; I even ended up copying and pasting the example code for the grid view tutorial and even the code in the tutorial doesn't work.
I'm not a programmer really, I just dabble in PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML and I've done a bit of ASP and VB in the past.
But this is a whole step up and when these things go wrong I've no idea, at all, how to fix them. If there was a good Android programming book out there I'd get it but they all have terrible reviews.
So I'm going back to using App Inventor and tbh all I want is a tabbed layout, or a grid where you can select to go to a new screen. My app is mostly info and if I were writing this in JavaScript, CSS and HTML I could do it in a day. Ideally I'd have tabs, to choose a section, and then buttons on the tabbed pages to choose the info. Like a reference set I suppose.
I can't find any code examples for multiple screens so can anyone tell me how to simulate this with App Inventor?
If it were a webpage I'd just alter the visibility of divs and then have links within the divs. It's actually a very, very simple concept...

No one knows? Seriously?

The App Inventor doesn't allow for tabbed displays, and I haven't really seen a viable way to simulate tabs.
I would suggest using Titanium Appcelerator, you build the app in Javascript, through it's API, and it'll compile into a working Android app
There's a free version, and a Paid version, but really all you need is the freebie

Web App Game Development

I think I want to try to make a mobile game.
I made a browser game a while ago for a collage class that was very similar to kingdom of loathing. I want to port this to more of a "web app" style to be multi platform for mobile phones.
I'm not asking questions on coding specific questions, though I do need to know, other then the web development code (html, php, database(sql, mysql), javascript that I either know or have enough basic knowledge and reference material to make good use of, what other languages should I know.
So thats question one, will I really need to delve down into java to be able to make a web app game for android (iphone, winmo, etc maybe)
Secondly, when writing, should I get a browser version of the game working first, and then port it, or should I start mobile from the ground up?
If I posted this in the wrong section or If I'm completely in the wrong frame of mind here let me know.

Your question is not very clear. Are you planning to make a web app or an android app? Because they are two different things for me.

Sorry about that
I guess both, A game that you can play from a web browser but also android... Though I've started to actually answer my own question...
And an example of a similar concept is with facebook.
There is facebook for web browser, but there is also a mobile app.
What I need to do is develop an API for the game and be able to show it on both.

hmm. actually facebook is an application not a game so this is not related with your concept but you can make a game application and create a web based game istatistic page.
or you can create android game and create a web page which include episode tricks or riddles. when you get true answers from user then you can switch him/ her to new episode. etc.
i just want to give you an idea in order to use them together.

Android App Developing

Recently, I felt inspired and I want to begin to try and create Android Applications, Widgets, and games. However, I have no idea what language it's written in and if there's a specific book that would help me plz link me to it.
Also, what language is it written in? lol
Thnx guys

Probably a good idea to do a search (xda or google) before posting threads like this, which there are already hundreds exactly the same.
Android apps are written in Java. There quite a few threads about android books on this forum.
Start with the sdk documentation and examples here.
Don't expect it to be super easy, there isn't a website, book or tutorial that is going to teach you to write awesome apps in 20mins. It will take time.

Download the .zip in the first post here - http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=854462
University standard basic java tutorials

What Topic Do I Need To Tackle To Develop This Kind Of App?

The harvard university android app from google play store. (I can't seem to post any outside link yet for this account)
I want to create one for may school but I'm just starting to learn android programming, so guys I need your help on the topics that I need to study to create an app like that. I greatly appreciate any kind of comments. Cheers!

clonedaccnt said:
The harvard university android app from google play store. (I can't seem to post any outside link yet for this account)
I want to create one for may school but I'm just starting to learn android programming, so guys I need your help on the topics that I need to study to create an app like that. I greatly appreciate any kind of comments. Cheers!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Fragments, ListViews, JSON parsing (for communication with the web server to download news etc), Android SQLite databases (I suggest using this to store the information from the webserver locally so the app does not require a constant internet connection to view a news article for example), Google Cloud Messaging notifications, notifications, encryption.
There are lots more but these are some of the main ones. In addition I would not advise trying to copy the "look" or aesthetics of the Harvard application as it frankly looks disgusting, whoever designed that needs a course in UI design

any book suggestions?? im only studying at home and wanted to start studying android app development

m0nm0npalam0n said:
any book suggestions?? im only studying at home and wanted to start studying android app development
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Android Application Development for Dummies and Learn Java for Android Development are 2 that I have in ebook form, though I can't say I've used them much as I don't really learn by reading books, more like looking at the source code of other apps and messing with it to see what happens
Android Application Development for Dummies goes through a wide range of topics including widgets, SQLite storage, possibly SharedPreferences (can't remember), ListView etc but does assume that you can at least follow what the sample code is doing - the sample code is commented but if you have not done any coding at all before then you probably should learn the basics of Java before reading it

Jonny said:
Android Application Development for Dummies and Learn Java for Android Development are 2 that I have in ebook form, though I can't say I've used them much as I don't really learn by reading books, more like looking at the source code of other apps and messing with it to see what happens
Android Application Development for Dummies goes through a wide range of topics including widgets, SQLite storage, possibly SharedPreferences (can't remember), ListView etc but does assume that you can at least follow what the sample code is doing - the sample code is commented but if you have not done any coding at all before then you probably should learn the basics of Java before reading it
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thanks man! this really helps

Jonny said:
Fragments, ListViews, JSON parsing (for communication with the web server to download news etc), Android SQLite databases (I suggest using this to store the information from the webserver locally so the app does not require a constant internet connection to view a news article for example), Google Cloud Messaging notifications, notifications, encryption.
There are lots more but these are some of the main ones. In addition I would not advise trying to copy the "look" or aesthetics of the Harvard application as it frankly looks disgusting, whoever designed that needs a course in UI design
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you very much for the reply, I'm really thankful for the information that you share. Can you please clear this one for me?
I suggest using this to store the information from the webserver locally so the app does not require a constant internet connection to view a news article for example
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

clonedaccnt said:
Thank you very much for the reply, I'm really thankful for the information that you share. Can you please clear this one for me?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
When you get data from a server to an Android app you use php for the server code - for example you can use php/mysql to run a search for calendar events in the database and return those events. Then you need to use php's JSON encode function to send the data in a JSON array.
The output should look something like this - this is the output of the calendar database for my school:
http://wgsb.cobainschofield.com/android_db/get_calendar.php (note this is not the live schools site, its the test server the guy who maintains the live site allows me to mess with err use).
You would then use a JSON parser class and an AsyncTask from within the app to "download" the content of the JSON array and then display it in a listview or textview etc.
Now obviously to get this information requires an internet connection yes? So every time someone wanted to check for an event on the calendar or read a news article for example they would need a working internet connection to receive the output of the get_calendar script, this is inefficient and bad design as it does not allow for offline viewing of the data.
Therefore what you can do is use androids SQLite implementation to create a local sql database then the first time you need to get the data from the webserver, you connect to the internet and get the output of the php script, the using the JSON parser class you store the information in the sqlite database then get the information from the database to display to the user.
By this way users can view news articles or calendar events offline and you only need to connect to the internet to refresh the information
I've uploaded screenshots in the attachments of how I've done it for my school's app.

That made it clear! Thank you very much.