Question

I’ve recently been asked to develop an application for the Motorola MK4000, an all-in-one device with a built-in barcode scanner. It runs Windows CE and supports VB.Net.

I’ve never written an application for Windows CE, nor using a barcode scanner.

I’m familiar with VB.NET so I’m confident I can figure this out, but I was hoping someone could point me to some resources on how to use the barcode scanner with possibly some example code of how to detect it and read data from it.

Thanks.

Answer 1

With Windows CE, you’ll be writing your application in the .NET compact framework. To do this, you’ll need to use Visual Studio 2008 Professional (2010 doesn’t work with the .NET CF). Since it’s .NET, you can use Visual Basic, or C#, whatever you’re most comfortable with. And yes, it’s very similar to what you’re already used to with VB.NET.

I suggest then downloading the appropriate version of the Windows Mobile SDK for your Visual Studio installation. The SDK contains some samples, emulators, and libraries you’ll need for developing Windows CE applications in VS 2008.

Next, as Sallow suggested, go to Symbol’s site and download the appropriate development kit for your model device. This will contain the libraries necessary for interfacing with the scanner as well as some sample development projects.

In order to debug/emulate, you’ll need to download Windows Mobile Device Center. You can then startup emulators in VS2008 (provided you’ve installed the Windows Mobile SDK), and connect to these emulator instances using the mobile device manager. Here’s a guide from Microsoft on how to do this.

Development from then on should be pretty straightforward. Once you’re all setup, here’s a good getting started link from Microsoft that helped me. For me, I downloaded the Barcode Scanner Pattern Framework from Microsoft and used that code to communicate with the scanner as it was fairly well organized and written.

Since your barcode scanner is built-in to the device, you don’t need to worry about interfaces as some have mentioned. You only need to use the appropriate Symbol libraries and subscribe to the scanner Read events. Again, I would suggest the Microsoft barcode scanner pattern factory as a place to start with this… Good luck!