There are still reasons to go the Microsoft route, by the way. Visual C++ lets you hack Windows CE in every way possible. It generates tight, highly optimized machine code and provides full access to the Windows CE API set; I assume the creators of all the products mentioned in this article used Visual C++ and the Windows CE toolkit to create them. C++ is currently the only way to use the Windows CE structured storage system fully, and MFC (i.e., Microsoft Foundation Classes) is hugely useful in developing full C++ apps because it does so many things for you. Visual Basic for Windows CE is no match for its Windows 98/Windows NT counterpart, but it has plenty of custom controls of its own, and a forms package that makes creating small utilities and line of business applications that rely heavily on forms and databases. Its forms designer, in my opinion, beats any of the forms designers surveyed here. But for convenience, ease of use, and speed of development, every one of these products gives its Microsoft counterparts some stiff competition.

What's in a handheld development system?
The development systems shared these characteristics:

• They run on handheld Windows CE machines (and usually Palm-sized machines too);

• They don't require any of Microsoft's Windows CE Toolkits;

• They're very easy on the pocketbook, ranging from free to absurdly cheap (nothing over $25);

• System resources are comparatively modest; a minimal installation without documentation files typically consumes only about 200-500K of permanent storage;

• They don't generate native machine code or allow direct access to the Win32 APIs on your Windows CE machine, so they all require some kind of runtime support (provided by the developers at no cost).

This is a new market, and these development environments must run under sharply constrained system resources.

PocketC
PocketC from OrbWorks (at http://www.orbworks.com) is the best of the languages described here for creating programs that look and feel like real Windows CE applications. While it is nowhere near as comprehensive or as fast as Visual C++, it more than compensates in ease of use and drastically lower entry costs--it runs a mere $25 for H/PC users, and--oddly--$24.95 for P/PC users. Don't ask me. Installation is straightforward but there is no installer program.

[Actually, the pricing difference might make some sense. Sometimes, you use different prices to see if different price points perform better. But I suspect different reasoning. Back when I had a software company, we'd regularly get checks without the buyer telling us which product in our line he or she was buying. By pricing the two products slightly differently, you can tell which product to send based on the amount of the payment. -- DG]

PocketC doesn't generate machine code like Visual C++. Instead, it writes intermediate code interpreted by a freely distributable runtime, which OrbWorks calls a virtual machine. This is the same approach taken by Visual Basic up until Version 4 and by Java now. Windows CE machines are particularly well suited to the use of VMs because they tend to run client applications that don't need incredibly fast loop or integer performance. The runtime is small, in the neighborhood of 100K. I have seen no programs written in PocketC that suffered from performance problems.