Wednesday, January 29, 2003
SYWARE Visual CE: Powerful & Flexible Application Building
Posted by Andy Sjostrom in "DEVELOPER" @ 02:00 AM
Darren Humphries (Dazz) is a Senior Account Manager at Opensoft Inc and a frequent Pocket PC Thoughts visitor. Darren has written a review of SYWARE Visual CE 7.0, an application development tool which is very simple to use yet very powerful. Check it out!
If you are a wannabe-coder but don't know where to start or even if you are a code jockey you should take a look at Visual CE from SYWARE. For those that don't know, Visual CE has been around for quite a while and can pretty well be considered the grand-daddy of database and development environments for Windows CE. SYWARE, who has recently released version 7.0, has built on an already flexible and powerful RAD (Rapid Application Development) solution. I have had a chance to use with it and am impressed.
Visual CE Building Blocks
To build your app you start by building a table and then build a form based on that table. Building forms is a fairly simple drag-and-drop affair. The complexities of your application are at the form level and not table. There are a number of field types to add functionality to your app. The field types include:
My Music Collection Catalogue
You can create an application that will catalogue your complete music collection. You could create tables for CD's, Tracks and Artists. Then create a form for each. On the CD form you can create a "jump" button to the Artist form and can create a grid (sub form) that will list all of the tracks on that CD. On the Artist form you can create a grid that shows all of the CD's for that Artist. By linking all of these forms with grids and buttons you end up creating your very own application. This really just scratches the surface of what Visual CE can do though. You can customize your forms with images. A rather big feature for me is the ability to develop on both the desktop and Pocket PC. I take the train to work everyday and when I am not reading I am able to build and customize forms. With the Enterprise version you can access server databases wirelessly using SYWARE's mEnable.
The following images are screen shots from applications built using Visual CE!
Figure 1: Custom built Contacts application
Figure 2: It’s very easy to link forms together
Extensibility for Enterprise
Visual CE also allows interaction with other devices such as bar code scanners and GPS units. Using a bar code scanner and mEnable a company could equip warehouse employees with the ability to quickly take stock and compile orders. For you developer types who would like very much to snub your noses at Visual CE...you'd better take another look. Visual CE includes a Macro ability of sorts by daisy chaining command buttons together. If-then-else logic statements are possible as well and when combined with the Macro's ability to skip steps a fairly complex application and comprehensive solution is possible. I can't stress enough how powerful the calculation field is. You haveto see it to believe what is possible. The usual arithmetical functions are there of course but then you can use a huge variety of advanced calculation functions like sums, averages, high/lows, truncate, sin, cos, tangent, etc. Calculations can also be based on dates with some interesting goodies like showing the month name after a date calculation and a bunch of other things.
Did I mention that you can distribute your application royalty free? Yep, with the Professional version includes a license to distribute without any licensing fees to your users. Be careful if you want to build a fairly complex app, make sure you read the user manuals carefully. Also, I had a few problems in getting my databases to sync because of the field properties not being set properly in Microsoft Access. These are not the fault of Visual CE, rather an over-enthusiastic jumping-in on my part.
Gotchas
None - this is a solid and highly refined application.
Where To Buy
You can buy SYWARE's Visual CE in the following editions (affiliate links):
Conclusions
As mentioned, I have found Visual CE 7.0 to be very capable and comprehensive. If you're looking to build simple or complex applications, SYWARE Visual CE is an excellent choice.
If you are a wannabe-coder but don't know where to start or even if you are a code jockey you should take a look at Visual CE from SYWARE. For those that don't know, Visual CE has been around for quite a while and can pretty well be considered the grand-daddy of database and development environments for Windows CE. SYWARE, who has recently released version 7.0, has built on an already flexible and powerful RAD (Rapid Application Development) solution. I have had a chance to use with it and am impressed.
Visual CE Building Blocks
To build your app you start by building a table and then build a form based on that table. Building forms is a fairly simple drag-and-drop affair. The complexities of your application are at the form level and not table. There are a number of field types to add functionality to your app. The field types include:
- Text - any combination of characters and numbers.
- Note - basically a large text field.
- Checkbox - ummm…checkbox.
- Drop down - tapping on field will show choices to select. User can add items or you can have the field select items from another table.
- Radio button - shows multiple item where you can only select one.
- Calculated - VERY powerful calculations (more later).
- Scribble - allows handwriting and drawings.
- Timestamp - will populate a date field when activated.
- Image - any image including bmp, gif, jpg
- Autonumber - assigns incremental value to numeric field.
- Command buttons - almost all menu functions and used for Macro language
- Jump - open another form to view/add related records.
- Lookup - pull value of a record from another table.
- Grids - like a list of related records from another table (like a sub form).
My Music Collection Catalogue
You can create an application that will catalogue your complete music collection. You could create tables for CD's, Tracks and Artists. Then create a form for each. On the CD form you can create a "jump" button to the Artist form and can create a grid (sub form) that will list all of the tracks on that CD. On the Artist form you can create a grid that shows all of the CD's for that Artist. By linking all of these forms with grids and buttons you end up creating your very own application. This really just scratches the surface of what Visual CE can do though. You can customize your forms with images. A rather big feature for me is the ability to develop on both the desktop and Pocket PC. I take the train to work everyday and when I am not reading I am able to build and customize forms. With the Enterprise version you can access server databases wirelessly using SYWARE's mEnable.
The following images are screen shots from applications built using Visual CE!
Figure 1: Custom built Contacts application
Figure 2: It’s very easy to link forms together
Extensibility for Enterprise
Visual CE also allows interaction with other devices such as bar code scanners and GPS units. Using a bar code scanner and mEnable a company could equip warehouse employees with the ability to quickly take stock and compile orders. For you developer types who would like very much to snub your noses at Visual CE...you'd better take another look. Visual CE includes a Macro ability of sorts by daisy chaining command buttons together. If-then-else logic statements are possible as well and when combined with the Macro's ability to skip steps a fairly complex application and comprehensive solution is possible. I can't stress enough how powerful the calculation field is. You haveto see it to believe what is possible. The usual arithmetical functions are there of course but then you can use a huge variety of advanced calculation functions like sums, averages, high/lows, truncate, sin, cos, tangent, etc. Calculations can also be based on dates with some interesting goodies like showing the month name after a date calculation and a bunch of other things.
Did I mention that you can distribute your application royalty free? Yep, with the Professional version includes a license to distribute without any licensing fees to your users. Be careful if you want to build a fairly complex app, make sure you read the user manuals carefully. Also, I had a few problems in getting my databases to sync because of the field properties not being set properly in Microsoft Access. These are not the fault of Visual CE, rather an over-enthusiastic jumping-in on my part.
Gotchas
None - this is a solid and highly refined application.
Where To Buy
You can buy SYWARE's Visual CE in the following editions (affiliate links):
- Visual CE Lite ($19.90)
- Visual CE Personal Edition ($129.90)
- Visual CE Professional Edition ($399.90)
- Visual CE Enterprise Edition ($599.00)
Conclusions
As mentioned, I have found Visual CE 7.0 to be very capable and comprehensive. If you're looking to build simple or complex applications, SYWARE Visual CE is an excellent choice.
