This article will help you get up and running with the Color Button Control we sell in the DEVBUZZ Store. For a limited time we have the Color Button Control in our store for $9.95. It's incredibly easy to use, comes with full Visual Studio design-time support and will make your Pocket PC applications much more attractive.

We drag ourselves to the office each day, write our beautiful looking .Net CF applications, and finally, when that big day arrives - the code is finished, the QA department has stopped hassling us about the number of outstanding bugs, and we're ready to turn it into an easy-to-deploy installation package.. errr... oh heck. How little work can we put into this without having to talk every user through installing a set of .cab files onto their device, in a particular order ? Shall we just write a quick Word doc and leave it to our Support guys...? It seems amazing that PocketPC development has been going on for this many years, yet there still isn't a de-facto way of bundling up our PocketPC .cab files into some kind of easy-to-deploy installer.

Many concurrent, distributed or real-time applications has to tightly co-work with other objects, which are called service providers. A service is formally specified by a set of primitives (operations) available to service users (applications). These primitives describe some action or report on an action taken by a peer component/entity to be performed. The service primitives can be classified into four categories: request, indication, response and confirm. This article describes how to run state machine application framework based Win32/WinCE programs using window message hooking technology.

Merge replication is ideally suited to portable devices because it allows data to be updated autonomously on the portable device and the server. The data can later be merged when the device is connected to an instance of SQL Server. Server CE synchronizes with SQL Server by establishing an HTTP connection to the SQL Server Publisher through Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS).

The Compact Framework has the ability to access SQL Server 2000 databases from the handheld device. This is a very powerful tool for developers, as it allows real-time access to corporate data, in a secure environment. The handheld can be connected to the network using a wireless Ethernet connection, or using a GPRS connection. This means that corporate data can be made available to authorized employees wherever they can get access. A salesman ‘on the road’ can connect to the office, and get the latest stock figures to ensure he has enough stock to fulfill an order. This article will show how to connect to a remote database, and retrieve data, using Visual Basic .NET to demonstrate access.