As a newbie, I’m not sure if this is the right place for my question – if not, I’d appreciate some redirection.

I am working in product management in a software company that develops enterprise level applications for commercial organisations in the distribution sector.

We are currently working on developing a range of mobile applications and have done some prototyping using the Window Mobile 6 dev environment. This seemed like a good option as we already use .Net in our application development teams, however we are becoming concerned that user response times for our prototype are very slow.

For example, opening the customer browse takes 4 seconds before the customer list appears and opening the product browse takes a similar amount of time. Note this excludes any network delay as we have a local database for customers and products which then syncs orders asynchronously when the network is available.

This slowness is a real concern for us, as it would make any product much less attractive to our customers. We may have to consider a different os and I was therefore wondering what experience other developers have had when developing enterprise applications for Window Mobile 6 and other mobile os?

The hardware we were using was a HTC Diamond 2 – for spec see HTC - Products - HTC Touch Diamond2 - Specification .

I look forward to your input.

Thanks ctesias

This is a great question. I would like to also mention that I would love to know the answer to this as well. I know your frustration when it takes an ample amount of time to load programs and your entirely sure why. That's why software development is so tricky. There are a variety of software development organizations that I'm sure do mobile application development and any advice is greatly appreciated.

- Mary

Programming Windows Mobile applications is really something special. Using normal Framework code is not sufficient for this platform in order to get a responsive application.

The first important step is to use StringBuilder instead of strings when you are adding strings. The garbage collector is really slow on this platform.

When accessing SQL data, always use the SQLCEResultset and TableDirect when possible.

Never load more data than you can display. Use the controls from Resco.net to load data from SQLCEResultset in order to get this behaviour. Look for the DelayedLoad property which helps you achieve this.

Try to do everything offline. Accessing webservices and other online services can be really slow and frustrating for the user. If you must do so, do it on a separate thread with lower priority than the main thread. Always keep the user interface responsive, at any cost.