Pocket PC Thoughts: Mobile DevCon 2004 San Francisco

Day Two - Mobile Keynote
Thursday’s keynote was Mobile specific. Chris Anderson did an excellent job of stepping in to give the keynote at short notice. All attendees were given a .NET Compact Framework poster illustrating the classes included in v1.0 of the Compact Framework. We were given demonstrations of the development experience today using the .NET Compact Framework and the Mappoint Web service, followed by a look at development “tomorrow” with Visual Studio 2005 preview.

Visual Studio 2005
Although yet to reach Beta, an early preview version of Visual Studio 2005 was made available to all attendees on DVD. This is also available for all MSDN subscribers to download. There are numerous exciting improvements for the mobile developer.

For .NET Compact Framework developers version 2.0 of the framework is available. It introduces a number of controls and classes missing from the initial release. Also, interoperability with native code is greatly improved with COM interop support, improvement marshalling and the ability to host the Compact Framework runtime within another process. There will also be built-in support for Cryptography and Messaging (MSMQ) namespaces.

The Forms designer is improved to offer a true WYSIWYG experience with a device skin applied that can be rotated in the case of Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition devices. Also, the form designer supports docking your controls so that you can more easily support form designs which gracefully layout on multiple screen orientations.


Figure 5: Visual Studio 2005 preview.

A new emulator technology which emulates the ARM instruction set (as used on the actual devices themselves) will be included. This includes the ability to save snapshots of the emulator memory to disk, hopefully making it easier for us developers to produce demonstrations for application in development.

Visual Studio 2005 will allow native code development for devices – currently you have to use the separate eVC++ product to do this and now Visual Studio will become the de-facto IDE for all types of development projects.

Microsoft MapPoint Location Server
For enterprises, Microsoft has recently released its Location Server product. This works in conjunction with the existing Mappoint mapping Web services and allows enterprises to support and keep track of users and provide the capability to find nearby users, produce routes add pushpins to locations and send notifications. The system is fully programmable through an SDK and uses standard components such as SQL Server to store the data.

Hands on Labs
There were three hands-on labs set up with development tools and devices where attendees could drop in and try out a number of development tasks. These included modifying applications to gracefully support orientation changes between Portrait and Landscape, and develop location aware applications. These were a mixture of .NET Compact Framework (Visual Studio 2003) and native code (eVC++) tasks.

Exhibition
The exhibition included exhibitors for MDC and VSLive and SpeechTek conferences. A few device manufacturers were offering device flashing on-site. Motorola was offering a Windows Mobile 2003 update for MPx 200 phone users, HP and Dell were upgrading selected models to a Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition Beta release. I decided against this with my iPaq 2210 as the beta ROM does not support Bluetooth at all, which would pretty much cripple the device which I use daily.

Ask the MVPs
During the conference, a number of Windows Embedded and Mobile Device MVPs were on hand to answer questions. There was also time set aside for this in the dining area on Thursday.

Midnight Madness
A large raffle of Motorola MPx 200 phones and other items provided by conference sponsors also took place that day. Also a number of “victims” from the audience were given makeovers to turn them from geek to chic. Even Kevin Lisota got the makeover treatment, though for someone who has been known to dress as Batman in public he was given a fairly mainstream smart-casual look. It didn’t really live up to the name as there was little madness and it didn’t go on until midnight.