Creating Barcodes on the Pocket PC

PocketPC is Microsoft®'s mobile operating system. There are three standard solutions for using barcodes on the PocketPC:

1. Create an application that runs on the PocketPC and displays barcodes on the screen, prints barcodes directly from the PocketPC device, and/or saves the barcodes to some form of removable media (e.g. Smart Card, USB hard drive, SD card), by using the IDAutomation Pocket PC Barcode DLL for Compact Framework. More about creating an application for the Pocket PC and Tutorial.
2. Display barcodes through a browser using the Pocket PC device's wireless internet connection and the IDAutomation ASP.NET Web controls. More about displaying barcodes in a browser and Tutorial.
3. Create barcodes using IDAutomation fonts in an application, such as Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, or any other application that supports TrueType fonts. More information about using fonts.

In order to create an application for the PocketPC, the user will need Microsoft® Visual Studio .NET 2003 (VS.NET) and the IDAutomation Pocket PC Barcode DLL for the .NET Compact Framework. This control provides the ability to create barcodes in a variety of formats on the PocketPC. The control integrates directly into VS.NET and can be included in the PocketPC application by adding the control to the Toolbox and dragging the design time version of the control onto a form.

Combining the control and the VS.NET IDE, a barcode display and printing application can be created. The following illustration is a sample application, running on a PocketPC device, showing the basic features of IDAutomation Barcode control for the Compact Framework

Another method for displaying and printing barcodes on a PocketPC, would be to combine the wireless internet features of a PocketPC with Pocket Explorer. IDAutomation's ASP.NET Barcode Web Server Controls for the .NET Framework give the ability to add barcodes to the web pages. This control will send an image to the browser in either PNG or JPEG format. The following two images illustrate the Web control being used in a PocketExplorer.

IDAutomation Barcode Fonts will need to be copied to the \Windows\Fonts directory of the target device. IDAutomation does not produce a Pocket PC installation utility for this process, so it will be necessary to manually copy these files from a desktop computer to the \Windows\Fonts directory on the target device using either Windows® Explorer or ActiveSync.

Unfortunately, Pocket PC 2002 does not support VBA automation for Microsoft® products. This means that IDAutomation's font automation tools will not work in products such as Pocket Excel, Pocket Word, Pocket Access, etc., directly on the Pocket PC. The font automation tools are necessary to encode the data into the proper format for the fonts and the scanners that will read the barcodes. Therefore, this means that the user will not be able to dynamically change the data contained in the barcode while on the Pocket PC. The user will need to manipulate the data on the desktop computer, then copy the spreadsheet, document, etc., to the Pocket PC device. For more information about using barcode fonts on the Pocket PC.

If the user is a .NET developer, then IDAutomation's C# or VB.NET libraries could be used for encoding the data on the Pocket PC.

© Copyright 2000-2007 IDAutomation.com, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Legal Notices.