A
AnthonyT
I have been asked to consider doing a PDA based programming project,
and since this is a new area of development for me I was hoping someone
could tell me if what I am being asked to do is possible etc.
Over all project description:
This is a data capture application, think of it as an ongoing survey.
Every so often ( several time a day ) the PDA needs to 'wake up', play
a sound to notify the user, then ask the user a series of multiple
choice, true/false type questions. Next after a few days the PDA will
be brought to a location for the data to be dumped into a
laptop/desktop
system for data analysis.
This is for a 'medical' research study, the idea is to ask how the
subject is feeling etc so we can see how the treatment is working.
There is of course all kinds of details like data encryption, data
storage etc. but those tasks I feel that I am capable of handling.
My developmen status:
While I have been developing for 25+ years, for the last ~15 years I
have been doing mostly Visual FoxPro ( or it's earlier versions ). I
have recently been learning .Net and C# but I am a
beginner at best with it. OOP and general programming skills I am
advance at, so I will be doing lots of what is the command to 'X'.
Furthermore I have never owned and only play very limitedly with PDAs
of any type.
My Questions:
a) Is my assumption that using 2003 .net ( or even the 2005 beta .net )
will allow me to 'easily' program a pocket PC based PDA
b) Can the application wake up every so often to alert the user? I'm
thinking that for power management reason it would have to power down
for a while. Maybe PDAs can run for a week with out having to shut
down. I expect a weeks is about the time lapse between data dumps.
The again the PDAs will most likely be recharged each nght. Side
question if some other application is running on the PDA ( There should
not be, but lets be prepared ) can this application keep running in the
background and come forward to get it's survey questions answered.
c) Since this application is the only thing that needs to run on this
PDA, what is the least expensive model that I should purchase. ( This
project might need up to 80 PDAs )
d) Should I consider other PDAs and Oss like Palm? Would this result in
significant hardware/software costs reductions.
e) Is there anything obvious that I missed?
Thank you so much for your time.
__________________
Anthony T.
and since this is a new area of development for me I was hoping someone
could tell me if what I am being asked to do is possible etc.
Over all project description:
This is a data capture application, think of it as an ongoing survey.
Every so often ( several time a day ) the PDA needs to 'wake up', play
a sound to notify the user, then ask the user a series of multiple
choice, true/false type questions. Next after a few days the PDA will
be brought to a location for the data to be dumped into a
laptop/desktop
system for data analysis.
This is for a 'medical' research study, the idea is to ask how the
subject is feeling etc so we can see how the treatment is working.
There is of course all kinds of details like data encryption, data
storage etc. but those tasks I feel that I am capable of handling.
My developmen status:
While I have been developing for 25+ years, for the last ~15 years I
have been doing mostly Visual FoxPro ( or it's earlier versions ). I
have recently been learning .Net and C# but I am a
beginner at best with it. OOP and general programming skills I am
advance at, so I will be doing lots of what is the command to 'X'.
Furthermore I have never owned and only play very limitedly with PDAs
of any type.
My Questions:
a) Is my assumption that using 2003 .net ( or even the 2005 beta .net )
will allow me to 'easily' program a pocket PC based PDA
b) Can the application wake up every so often to alert the user? I'm
thinking that for power management reason it would have to power down
for a while. Maybe PDAs can run for a week with out having to shut
down. I expect a weeks is about the time lapse between data dumps.
The again the PDAs will most likely be recharged each nght. Side
question if some other application is running on the PDA ( There should
not be, but lets be prepared ) can this application keep running in the
background and come forward to get it's survey questions answered.
c) Since this application is the only thing that needs to run on this
PDA, what is the least expensive model that I should purchase. ( This
project might need up to 80 PDAs )
d) Should I consider other PDAs and Oss like Palm? Would this result in
significant hardware/software costs reductions.
e) Is there anything obvious that I missed?
Thank you so much for your time.
__________________
Anthony T.
It was a bit of a nightmare