Converting Visual Basic Application to a Mobile Phone Application

Writing a direct app on the particular phone platform is the most direct route. Were you thinking Android, or Symbian or Linux for phones?

I do not know what you meant by "with setup functionality". You may want to explain that in order to get better responses.

The I/O is the big difference. Converting just text responses to answers and having text answers should be easy. If you have a graphic output or hot buttons that could be more work. If you want printer resources or disk saves that could be a big deal of work.

Good luck. There should be lots of ways to do this; including the old java browser app route.

Hello Jsolar,

Thank you very much for the reply.

By the "setup functionality" I meant the application could be installed on a PC from the setup icon.

I mean a universal kind of development which could run on all types of Os on phones.

Its a like the windows calculator it would take values as key strokes which need to be keyed into the particular fields of the calculator application window and based on the logic display a calculated result.

Any resources on how to go about this.

Thanks & best regrds,

George

My experience with this is somewhat limited and pretty dated, but I found that, when I was writing apps for my Palm Tungsten E2 in the Palm OS (Garnet, I believe was 5.2), it was far easier to develop from scratch than to try to "translate" similar apps I had written for the regular PC (most of my work focused on data acquisition, and the graphical interface was the last of my concerns...). This was true of Visual Basic, c, and Forth. Although I could use any of the three languages on either the Palm or the PC, each had their own peculiarities and specialized library calls that made porting really difficult. (except Forth- but Forth is not a very common or popular language, and there is a pretty steep learning curve- for me, at least). The SDK's now available for most platforms makes it a whole lot easier to just write smaller programs from scratch.

>> Is there any software that can automatically convert <<

No.

>> or should the logic be ported on to the language in which the mobile phone applications are developed ?<<

Yes.

>>I mean a universal kind of development which could run on all types of Os on phones. <<

Doesn't exist.

>>Any resources on how to go about this.<<

1. Define application's feature set

2. For each platform (iPhone, Android, etc.), guesstimate programming costs. Screen mock-ups and data flow diagrams are usually sufficient. Triple that number if you used the back of an envelope. Double it if you carefully constructed a data base and wrote stubs for the major routines.

3. For each platform, guesstimate dollar value of market share.

4. Compare cost "2" to revenue "3."

5. Re-examine "go / no go."