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November 16, 1998

WinCE: Your Next OS?

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Looking at the development tools for creating new applications on a Windows CE device provides a look into market acceptance of the product. Currently, you'll find only a few tools for Windows CE systems; the 3Com PalmPilot environment offers significantly more and varied development tools.

Microsoft sells CE development toolkits that are add-ons for its Visual Basic 5.0, Visual C++ 5.0, and Visual J++ 1.1 development products. Each CE toolkit contains a cross-compiler, debugging tools, Windows CE 2.0 software development kit, Windows CE environment emulator for testing your application, and an installation wizard for creating the necessary installation routines.

These toolkits have definite limitations. For example, only the Visual C++ toolkit can create applications for the palm-sized PC; all three toolkits can create applications for handheld PC devices. Only the Hitachi SH3 and Mips R3000 and R4000 CPUs are supported targets for application development with these toolkits, although Microsoft is touting much wider CPU support for Windows CE. The toolkits also require that you purchase the desktop version of the development tool in addition to the CE toolkit, and the CE emulator runs only on the Windows NT 4.0 operating system.

The Visual Basic toolkit only creates p-code that is (slowly) interpreted at run time by a Visual Basic run-time engine that you must also download to the handheld device. In my tests, a small Visual Basic application consumed more than 700 Kbytes of storage RAM when downloaded, mostly because of the VB run-time engine. Only the Visual C++ toolkit can create ActiveX controls, but you can then use these controls to create applications in VB; otherwise, a set of ActiveX controls is included with the VB toolkit and others will be available on Microsoft's Web site (www.microsoft.com).

The Visual J++ toolkit is a nonstarter for any device with a limited amount of memory. Running a Java application--applets are not supported--requires that you first download about 4 Mbytes of programs and libraries comprising the Java virtual machine. Once you complete this download, will you have enough memory left to download and run your Java application? For many users, the answer is no.

A couple of products that would use these toolkits to create more complex applications include CEfusion from Odyssey Software and Corporate Connection from River Run Software Group. CEfusion is a toolkit for CE devices connected to a server system via a wireless or wired connection that provides Open Database Connectivity, (ODBC) print, and file services to a CE application.

Corporate Connection is an ODBC toolkit for WinCE devices; in other words, with this package, you can write ODBC-based applications with Visual C++ or VB that can either instantly read or update your enterprise database or interact with a local database that is later synchronized with the enterprise database.

You can also find a few forms development tools from third-party vendors. The local "databases" you'll create with these last four tools use files to store the tables. To create real databases with stored procedures, transactions, and other important database features, check out the newly released Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere 6 for Windows CE. It includes a replication agent to reliably transfer data between the CE unit and your enterprise database, but it runs only on units with more than 8 Mbytes of memory.

You can also find other development languages, including Python, variants on Basic, Lisp, C, and Forth; however, these are predominantly shareware and freeware tools with very small support organizations. Some good sources for Windows CE software are Mobile Planet's CE Central (www.cecentral.com), the Windows CE Online Software Web site (www.winceonline.com), and CE Monster (www.cemonster.com).

The Future
Although Microsoft is claiming it has licensed more than 1 million CE devices so far, the reality is that this market is highly fragmented and no vendor has the market presence to challenge 3Com for the palm-sized PIM market. Notebook computers still far outsell handhelds for on-the-go users.

I expect the PalmPilot devices to continue to outsell palm-sized PC units. However, the E-mail improvements and additional device support included in the new H/PC Pro software provide a compelling alternative. You need to be aware of two drawbacks. First, H/PC Pro arrives about six months after the first Windows CE 2.0 devices were available, and each hardware vendor has a different approach to upgrading older units to take advantage of new functionality. This upgrade--if available--has a price. Vendors aren't being allowed enough time to establish their current product before the next generation is being offered, which could translate into support issues down the road.

Second, there are a limited number of applications available from software vendors to perform real work while you're on the road. Until you see a significant software vendor presence, these devices will attain only a small market share with business users.

On the other hand, for IT departments looking for mobile data collection devices, the CE 2.0 units--with their generally available development toolkits--provide a compelling alternative to highly specialized data collection terminals currently sold in these vertical markets.

Andy Feibus is president of CustomBytes, an application development consulting firm in Atlanta. He can be reached at amf@mindspring.com.

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