The first part of this three part series walks through the process of creating the actual Palm application. The focus will be on the actual functionality of the application, its UI, and navigation. Learn how to create menu systems, pop-ups, buttons and other UI elements, and also some general syntax for creating and editing databases.

• download source code for part 1

Purpose of the Application

The purpose of the application is to create and edit Web Log (blog) entries. If you are not familiar with blogs, then read http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/b/blog.html. One of the better known Microsoft Community (.NET) blog sites can be found at http://weblogs.asp.net/ including my public blog (http://weblogs.asp.net/rchartier).

Before developing an application, it's always a good idea to start with a quick planning session. The first part of the planning session entails listing all of the desired and needed features. A "want" or desire is something that would be cool to have, where as a "need" is something the application must have in order to actually solve the solution at hand.

The following is a list of the needs and wants that I see for our application:

Needs:

1. List current blog entries
2. Add/Edit/Delete blog entries
   a. Subject Line
   b. Date/Time
   c. Entry
   d. Upload Settings
3. List upload settings
4. Add/Edit/Delete upload settings
5. Support WebLogApi*

Wants:

1. Sort/Filter blog entries
2. Support FTP, HTTP uploads
3. Pull categories down via WebLogApi and allow entries to be sorted/classified into these categories

*WebLogApi: The WebLogApi is an effort that is in place to offer integration with applications and blogs. For more information refer to http://www.xmlrpc.com/discuss/msgReader$2198.

The "needs" seem like a pretty strong list of requirements for this article's sample application. Feel free to implement the "wants" on your own time.

After investigating all the tools at our disposal for creating applications on Palm devices, I have chosen NS Basic (http://www.nsbasic.com/palm/). I decided against many of the C based (http://www.metrowerks.com/products/palm/, http://www.orbworks.com/pcpalm/download.html) solutions because I want a quick time to market. If you want to investigate a C-based solution or learn how to create an application on the Palm using the C programming language, I do not recommend this article.

If you are familiar with the Visual Basic IDE and programming language, you will be able to learn and use this product quite quickly. The next section walks through setting up an environment for testing our progress with the Palm emulator.