AdrianHesketh

Hi all, I was wondering if the .Net comact framework can run on the Axim X5, if it can, then I'm buying one!

I thought Microsoft didn't support any processors for PocketPC 2002 other than the StrongARM. What's going on?

Cheers,
Adrian.

hesse

Yes, you will be able to run .NET Compact Framework on Axim or any XScale units. XSCale is backward compatible with ARMS applications.

No one is sure about it but MS does not seem to want to OPTIMIZE PocketPC OS for XScale. Things will still run but will not take advantage of benefits that XScale has...

AdrianHesketh

Super, in that case, I'll be buying an Axim next week. I thought that was the case, but I just had to check. I've been developing software using the Beta version of Visual Studio .Net 2003 and I must say that it's a joy. The older SDK for developing with the PPC meant that two winsock controls can't talk to each other. I can see there being a large market for applications running over various protocols on 802.11b especially running on a handheld so cheap and powerful as the Axim...

A lot of my existing .Net code seems to works fine on the StrongARM emulator - including my tcp sockets classes, which I was suprised at - but I need to see it on hardware to believe it.

It looks like my Handspring is going in the bin (well, being given to my brother)...

Thanks for the speedy reply!

ARM Hacker

From what I've gathered MS moved from being MIPS/ARM/etc compatible to only ARM V4te compatible. The X-scale is ARM V5te. ARMV5 is just an extension of V4 so there aren't any compatibility issues, but there are some extra instructions in V5 that allow code to run more efficiently and minimize the effects of slow memory (Which all PDA's now have).

For some reason, MS thinks adding these instructions would be 'optimizing for the XScale' when they want to stay totally processor independent. Its silly because these particular optimizations would work with any ARMV5 processor, the XScale is required to be fully ARM compliant.

Whats also silly is the idea of not tailoring PocketPC for each processor. If they didn't tailor code in WindowsXP for the Pentium4 and AMD Athalon, it would run terribly on both kinds of systems.