Most of us are not professional developers (I’ve not really written a line of code in almost 2 years) but how often have you wished you had a little program to fit a specific niche, searched the web and given up?

If you’re planning on developing a professional application then you need to look at Visual Studio and the Windows Mobile SDKs but sometimes you just need something to quickly prototype an idea.

There are a few alternatives on the market - NSBasic and CASL spring to mind as good ways to get started but recently I’ve been playing with Basic4PPC from Anyware Software ... and I like it.

Many years ago I used QBasic then moved to Visual Basic so I’ll admit to some familiarity with the language and programming structures but even for a very rusty coder Basic4PPC was very easy to get up and running - I went from never having seen the development tools or language to my first prototype in maybe 4 hours (and that included deciding to buy it and waiting for the licence key to turn up so I could compile the smartphone version!)

There are a number of very cool features about Basic4PPC that make it worth the (very reasonable) price-tag.

The first is useful for me because as well as having a desktop Interactive Development Environment (IDE) where you can create and run your application to test them there is also an IDE which runs on your Windows Mobile Professional device (it needs a touchscreen device) so you can edit and run without a PC. Even before you purchase you can test your idea on the desktop - just not compile it.

The second thing I like about it is the number of core libraries included so you don’t have to delve into the operating system to do things - you can access Pocket Outlook contacts, calendar and tasks, read your location from a GPS device, access the filing system, work with the network or registry and even databases.

There’s a thriving add-on developer community who have created a number of add-on libraries to support even more controls and functionality - Crypography, Graphing and Charts, Image Editing and an HTML control are just some of what’s available.

You can compile your application for PocketPC or Smartphone and it sanity checks the the features you’re using are supported on that platform, and you can choose to optimize the compilation (which assumes .NetCF2.0 and embeds required core libraries) or target .NetCF1.0 devices (resulting in a much larger executable but support for many older devices)

Though very handy (and allowing on-device development) it’s fairly obvious that this isn’t as full a development platform as Visual Studio. There are some limitations in the form designer (though I’ve been able to control things like tab order of fields by editing the source in notepad!) and the bias of it’s name is fairly evident - there’s a lot better support for PocketPC/Professional devices than there is for non-touch Smartphone devices.

Even with those issues it’s powerful enough for simple tasks, and there are plenty of samples online to get you started. Both the official support and the community forums are responsive and very helpful.

Stop talking about that one add-on that would make your Windows Mobile device perfect. Roll up your sleeves, dive into the IDE and have a go!

Me... I’m working on an app for my wife’s Dash and my BlackJack II (luckily they have the same screen layout so there’s minimal effort to cater for that). When she’s happy with it I’ll share ;)