Resco, a vendor of developer components and tools for mobile devices, has released Resco MobileApp Studio, a form-based mobile app developer tool that's optimized for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5.
Resco MobileApp Studio lets developers quickly design and build mobile forms. It is a Microsoft Visual Studio add-on, so all its tools are directly integrated in and accessed through Visual Studio 2008. All of the forms created with MobileApp Studio are generated with VB or C# source code and are attached to the application project.
Core to the tool is a set of advanced "designers" directly integrated into Visual Studio. There are two types ofdesigner available: a list form designer and detail form designer. When designing a form, you can use advanced database tools which allow databinding to an existing SQL Server Compact Edition database, or a business model’s database objects that are implemented in the entire Visual Studio solution. After the form design is completed, it can be saved together with the C# source code and attached to the entire project. Thus, the customization of created forms can be performed in a well-known environment, using the familiar programming language.
Another interesting feature of the product are visual styles. First, you define them for the entire application and then applies to all forms. Thus, a unified visual style of the app's forms is achieved. In case a change is needed, you only modifies the style and the change makes efect automatically in all forms.The idea of the styles is similar to Microsoft Word. For simplicity, Resco MobileApp Studio contains several form and style themes that help developers to start up a mobile app project.
In a related announcement, Resco also released MapNavigation, a .NET GPS navigation control. MapNavigation is a .NET CF control that lets you integrate a navigation solution into existing mobile applications..
