Develop for Windows CE5.0 or Windows Mobile 5.0?

Question

If you are a C# developer that uses Visual Studio 2010 Premium Edition and you need to write software for a device where you have option of choosing between: Windows CE5.0 or Windows Mobile 5.0 operating systems - which one would you opt for? Meaning less time messing around within installing additional supporting add-ins, libraries, extension, etc.

Note: it's a super basic app of scanning barcode to a textbox, submitting it to a .Net WSDL based web-service and reading the response, finally displaying it as a lablel

I've done research on this topic before and I remember that in some situation you need to install VS 2008 to do this (I want to avoid this type of time-sink)

I know Stack frowns upon this v.s. that questions - however this is not meant to be that, it's more of a technical - how fast to get up and running based on these details question.

Wasp WDT3250 Windows CE 5.0 http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3771319&CatId=298

Wasp WPA1200 Windows CE5.0 (WPA1200) or Windows Mobile 5.0 (WPA1200wm) operating system http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3774741&CatId=298

Answer 1

The first issue is that you can target neither of those devices with Studio 2010. You have to have Studio 2008 (which is not fun to try to get if you don't have MSDN). That's unfortunate and I, and the rest of the planet outside of Redmond seem to think it's a bad idea, but it is what it is.

Now as to which device to target, I'll always (or nearly always) choose Windows CE over WinMo. WInMo has a built-in Shell that makes it difficult to run a "kiosk" type app. It also has it's own behaviors for dialogs and Forms you'd like to have "less than full-screen". You have to do UI shenanigans to get the UI behavior you want, and my thinking is that you should spend time writing your app, not writing code to suppress unwanted platform behavior.