Developing a simple navigation application

[highline]

Hello,

I would like to to develop a simple navigation application (Pocket PC based as I have an iPAQ 3970 & Emtac bluetooth GPS) to navigate around a small area (golf course, housing estate, shopping area etc.) using POIs and a directional arrow to use while walking in such an area.

Questions are:
1. Which language am I best to try considering I'll have to learn pretty much from scratch, so VB based or Java?
2. How to read the GPS signals from the receiver to actually use in an application?
3. Are there any SDKs which will do most of the coding for me?
4. Is there already software out there (shareware/open source - not commercial)which would easily allow me to create a small map and have directional arrows to navigate to POIs on the map?

I already have TTN2 but obviously this is not suitable for the kind of navigation I am trying to create and I want something really basic that I can play about with myself.

I stress this will be a very simple application!! So any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Glyn

[trafcam]

I can't answer all of your questions, but 1 and 2 I can offer an opinion on. You can download embedded Visual Basic from Microsoft for no cost at all. This will allow you to develop applications for the iPAQ quite easily, but with lower performance than using embedded Visual C++ (which is also a free download). There are trade-offs when using these languages with Pocket PC 2003, and they are both as far as I know 'dead' in that Microsoft are not planning to enhance (or 'fix') them. If you want the latest and greatest you can use Visual Studio .NET but you have to get the very expensive one to develop for mobile platforms.

As for getting data off the GPS, most of them present as a COM port which you just open, then wait for x characters to be received, then process the characters. Most GPS receivers output in NMEA format which is available from various internet sources at no cost, or you can buy the specification documents from the NMEA for, I think, $200. If you're thinking about developing an application, you've probably got enough about you to look at the NMEA output and figure out what it all means anyway. Some GPS units output in SiRF mode which is more complicated.

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