Building Solutions with the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework: Architecture and Best Practices for Mobile Development

Microsoft and Mobility

Microsoft has been investing in mobility for over a decade. This investment began in 1992 with two projects code-named Pulsar and WinPad. The WinPad project was initially designed to produce a handheld PC (then termed a “PC Companion”) to compete with Apple's Newton MessagePad (which itself eventually failed to catch on) based on Windows 3.1, while the Pulsar project was aimed more at pager-like devices using an object-oriented operating system. However, due to internal struggles as to the feature sets to support and hardware issues, these projects ultimately failed to produce viable products. However, shortly thereafter in 1994, these projects were reorganized under the code name Pegasus, which eventually led to the release ...