Hello All,

I am a first time poster here, and had a general question. Briefly, I have developed a fairly simple app in VB5 (a couple of controls and some code to run them) and would like to be able to use it on a PDA, rather than having to lug around a laptop. The app is sales oriented.

Some of the questions I had were:
Is this posssible?
What would have to happen for this to work?
Has anyone had any experience doing this?
What PDA would work, and what flavor of VB is required.


Thanks

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All 3 Replies

There has been chatter about how to use Legacy VB with PDA's, without much real promise. A couple hype products (Crossfire and what not), but actually finding a working VB app on a PDA has been ultimately elusive. My strongest suggestion, is to look into VB.NET, with the Compact .Net Framework, which will allow most modern windows based PDA's to run your app. There is a site that appears to hold some promise... but the language is entirely it's own beast (ie: it's not actual VB at all.) called NS Basic. The product impressed me, but was overall not free of charge, which I find to be a big deal (not that .NET is free of charge either, but you know what I mean).

The only other possibility that I can see as an option... and believe me, this is quite the far shot, would be to see if the PDA can run ActiveX controls. You would most likely need to run it through the Web Browser of the PDA. If, and this is a very big if.... if it can run ActiveX controls, then you could basically port you application into an ActiveX control (another type of project instead of standard EXE) and embed that into a web site (unless it will just run natively which I doubt). Let me know how it turns out.

Thanks for the reply, and what you said is kind of what I figured, that being that this is going to be a challenge whichever way I go on it.

Your suggestion about putting it on a web page is probably a good one, but that then requires getting some type of wireless service. I can code in both vbscript and Perl, and code recode the original app if necessary, but again, I am trying to avoid this being a huge project.

The gist of the application is that is pulls then plays audio bytes, in a random order each time it runs. The bytes are questions and statements that relate to the business that I am in (mortgages) and the goal is to internalize them by listening to them over and over.

Perhaps there is a better way to do this, outside of what we have been talking about here. The other thought would be to put all of the sound bytes on an iPod, or similar device, and shuffle them that way. The way I have it set up in VB is to have background music behind them, to create a relaxed environment, and wonder if the iPod could play two tracks at the same time.

Thanks

I don't think it can do that... but it shouldn't be overly difficult to download the sound bytes, and use a simple software, like virtualdub or audacity to slap that over a soothing background.... I wish there were some kind of simplier way :/

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