Development environment

This section presents an overview of the development environment used to create FlexPendant SDK applications. You can program and debug the application using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or 2008.

Microsoft Visual Studio is supported by the .NET Framework. A core component of the .NET Framework is the common language runtime (CLR). It manages code execution, threads and memory, while also enforcing type safety.

Another major component is the Base Class Library, which is a comprehensive, object-oriented collection of reusable types. To become a skilled .NET programmer it is essential to learn the functionality offered by the Base Class Library.

It is not in the scope of this manual to teach how to use Visual Studio. For this purpose msdn is a useful source of information.

Note
For information about upgrading an existing FlexPendant SDK project to Visual Studio 2008 project, see Conversion of Visual Studio 2005 projects to Visual Studio 2008 .

The .NET Compact Framework 2.0. can be used for building enhanced user interfaces. FlexPendant specific controls are available in the Visual Studio toolbox since FlexPendant SDK 5.08 version.

Databinding is the process of binding a property of a GUI control to a data source, so that the property automatically reflects the value of the data source.

Together with Visual Basic, C# is the most widely used .NET language.

C# is an object-oriented language derived from C, with some features from C++, Java and Visual Basic. It was designed for .NET and offers the power and richness of C++ along with the productivity of Visual Basic. Both PC and FlexPendant SDK are implemented using C#.

For FlexPendant SDK applications only C# and Visual Basic are supported. Likewise, in this manual there are code samples in C# and Visual Basic, but none in J# or Visual C++.

At run-time it does not matter which language you have used, as compiled .NET code is language independent. The source code compiles from a high-level language into Intermediate Language (IL), which is then executed, at runtime, by the Common Language Runtime. This makes it possible to use different programming languages, even within the same application. For more information on .NET terms, see Definitions.

Note
It is presumed that you are already a .NET programmer. If not, you need to start by learning the programming language to be used. There are numerous books teaching C# and Visual Basic.

When FlexPendant SDK is installed on your computer, it is integrated with Visual Studio. You will notice when starting a new project, for example, that the project type FlexPendant is available in the New Project window. When using the wizard to create a FlexPendant project, common SDK references are added to the project and some code is automatically generated.

The visual design support for the FlexPendant will be accessible from the Toolbox in Visual Studio and work the same way as the design support for an ordinary Windows application. As you will see, using FlexPendant SDK is quite intuitive for a developer used to Visual Studio programming.

Note
The help module is not integrated with the Visual Studio Help function. Clicking F1 when pointing at code, for example, will open the Visual Studio Programmer’s Reference or the .NET Framework Class Library for the specific language and topic. If your problem is FlexPendant SDK related this will not help you.

Tip
You can find Reference Manual FlexPendant SDK in installation directory. Keep the reference file open while programming for reference.