After a 3-day weekend, I got the following working:

http://egrigg9000.www4.dotnetplayground.com/WebForm1.aspx

It seems pretty meager. However when you consider yesterday morning I was entirely despairing of having anything to show for my work (2 weeks), it's pretty miraculous. Here's what happened along the way:

Sat 15: Up at 4am, hash browns at a biker bar while coding. New random number web service is created based on My Senators, then converted to single form and placed on Brinkster. Seems to work as a back-end service when you just look at the asmx. I begin to write a local client with the intention of porting it over to the PPC. This means, I know, no fancy .NET stuff. After all, it's not my PPC (mine arrives tomorrow), so I don't want to mess with upgrading the OS and installing the framework. Seems like there's too much to risk there. So I try to think very hard: how to add a web reference to a project that is not .NET. Is this possible? After starting projects 10 different ways I think it's at least less documented than I would like. This is as good as impossible. In the afternoon I get smart and start downloading various toolkits for developing on PPCs. Each are 30 megs and I go to sleep with the modem churning.

Sun 16: Give up on the modem and go to the nearest WiFi joint. I download Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit, which turns out to be web apps not thick clients like I want. So then I download the eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0 which seems really promising until I find out that's for .NET targets as well. Add to that downloading various SDKs (which work in conjunction with the dev environments not in exclusion of), all badly named and some outdated. After browsing newsgroups I find out that I need eMbedded Visual C++ 3.0, that this will create non .NET thick clients to run on PPC (with the PPC SDK that you have to install yourself outside of the main script). Super. I finally get it, it won't install, I change the install path to root and it installs. This takes all day and I'm just as stuck as I was the night before. I boot up eVC3 and it might as well be written in Chinese. The hello world example has no code that I recognize. No TextBox1.Text, no Main for pete's sake. It looks like assembly. No chance of learning that scene in a couple of days. A week maybe.

Mon 17: I'm sulking in front of the DVD, wondering where to take my project. Good news is that I get the PPC to go online (finally), even though the settings are the same as what failed last time. This is a different story, and I decide to proceed with the Web service. It goes easily, except Brinkster does me a wrong turn. They have codebehind broken on their servers, so I start to think my conversion to singleform is broken. It works on my box as codebehind and as singleform, but not on theirs. So I switch to dotnetplayground. Figure out that you need to have all projects in root (this project won't be called Form1 for very long). Then as a miracle it all seems to work. I will see what my friends have to say about it working on their systems. One thing of curiosity. My web service returns an arraylist. But I couldn't assign this to an object in my code without generating an error. The solution was to assign it to the datasource field of a listview, which worked fine.

comment []8:36:44 AM