ProcalX

Hi all, first off nice 2 be on the forums (1st post)

I'm currently a student studying IT Consultancy / Networking, and a free-lance web designer / IT Consultant.

I have coded Pascal/Delphi before, and alittle Visual Basic for personal use, nothing more, small printing programs e.t.c, i chose the non-software path for my career, and as of yet have not needed much more than i already know.

However, i'm currently analysing a small company with 3 offices with 90 computers, implementing servers, tapes backups, domains e.t.c (the basics), they are using a bestoke piece of database software that is designed in Visual Basic, they plan to distrobute PDA's to their sales personel, as the sales personels seem to think it would be easier than a laptop - obviously.

All they need is to view/search details from a database and thats it.

The PDA is running Windows CE, i could sub-contract someone for this, but the company are in no hurry and i'd really like the oppurtunity to learn some programming..

So i ask you:
What type of database would be the best to use on a PDA CE OS in your opinion considering its VB.net? and where would i start.. any links to url's or just plain advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Tom

Dizzutch

are you going to have a centralized database? and are the PDA's going to connect to it through the internet, or are they all going to have their own database?
In the first case you could use any database, I like postgresql (www.postgresql.org). Most languages have libraries for connecting to this database, you could write a web-based front-end using PHP or perl, you could do it in C/C++ and i believe that even VB has postgresql connection capabilities, ifnot though ODBC. I'll need some more details on how you're expecting to set this up, before I can make a concrete recommendation.
-Dizz

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Infinite Recursion

In general, I'd go with a MySQL (mysql.com) database with a PHP (php.net) front-end.

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ProcalX

The database is to be run purely by itself on each PDA, no centralization.

The database they will be given is just a template, which they can then personalise with their own customers, it's just a temporary database, and it means that when they find a new customer they can input their details quickly and onto their PDA database for future reference, and their own notes e.t.c.

So it's not internet based, if it was net based i would build it in PHP and MYSQL as i could do that in about 2-3 hours with my current knowledge, but its not so it has to run on Windows CE as a stand-alone database.

Thanks very much.

Dizzutch

From a design standpoint, why wouldn't you have a centralized database? What if a sales rep. has built relationships with customers, then goes on vacation, leaves his cases with another rep. and takes his PDA. Now nobody can access any of the information relating to those customers. Also, what if a sales rep. is kinda stupid (trust me, they're not as smart as they'd like you to think they are) and hard-boots his PDA, boom, DB gone. I don't know about any DB servers that run on Windows CE, I doubt there are any good ones. You're better off saving the data in XML.

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ProcalX

OK, so creating an XML based output of the database, and host it on their web server for instance.. It'd have ot be pretty secure though, and im not quite sure how i would go about designing the site to fit on the requirements of a PDA..

Apologies for my amateur start on this, but i have to start somewhere.

Dizzutch

I wouldn't export the database in XML, I would use a XML file to store the data, instead of a database, then you can read in the file and parse it outputting the information, with whatever language you wish.

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Rory

If you haven't already, have a look for the development tools for the .NET Compact Framework in Visual Basic (used to be only for Enterprise last time I checked, but apparently the SDK is now a free download). Then when you fire up the development environment, you will have a designer with all the windows CE widgets, and the project will run in an on-screen emulator, unless you connect your pda somehow, in which case it'll run and debug while on that.

Before jumping in, I'd suggest just trying a "hello world" app on the PDA to see if it's going to work. The compact .NET framework seems to miss out some important stuff apparently at random, so you may have to write your own code for communicating with a non MS SQL server (actually quite straightforward), as custom compiled assemblies aren't supported (like the full .net one for MySQL), and you may have to experiment based on the network protocol you want to use (TCPClient should work with normal wireless, bluetooth etc but I'd check in practice with your setup). Just ensure the PDA has the .NET runtimes installed.

Dizzutch

He's not using a MySQL server though, he wants all the PDA's to have their own database installed.

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