>I am looking for suggestions for:
>
>- Best Pocket PC hardware to use for functionality/flexibility/price. Is there any particular unit that lends itself better to development? We will want to incorporate barcode scanning, any good/bad experiences with different barcode option (pc/card, cradle, etc.)?

I think the iPaq is currently the best of breed because it has sleeve technology that allows you use add on pc card, and flash cards. The PC card will make the device wireless. We use Lucent cards which gives us 2 megs per second speed. The jacket technology allows you to use any device that simply has a POcket PC OS driver writen for it, instead of waiting for someone to build a device (modem, nic or whatever) for your Pocket Pc. The iPaq has a huge market share in the POcket PC world (over 80% I think).

>- Best development tools. My employer is very big on sticking with the Microsoft platform so we are thinking about VB.net. Of course we have to integrate the data with our existing VFP application.

I would recommend building a web app, that targets the Pocket PC Internet Explorer (which currently emulates IE3, I think). And do your development with ASP.NET. This is better than targetting the Pocket PC OS with eVB or eC since now you built a generic app that can adapt to Tablet PC, Palms (in the future), PCs, a different PDA or anything else with a browser without having to rewrite the app. Then add on wireless network card (PC Card) to access the website.

>- Resources to get started. Is there a good book or some good websites? Of course this is probably tied to the development tool used.

The UT for ASP.NET :-)
www.learnvisualstudio.net (in addition to the UT and UT videos)
www.pocketpcmag.com then search for "Designing Web Sites for Both Desktops and Pocket PCs"