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PPC and eVB at PDC
I was blown away in July of 2000 at
the Orlando Professional Developers Conference. It seemed
almost unbelievable to me that the Microserfs had literally
re-built all of the development tools from the ground up
while no one was looking. Somehow, they had kept the whole
operation under cover for about three years and already
had a preview set of CDs to give us to take home and try.
It was one of the first conferences that I started to use
a Pocket PC to take notes during sessions and, along with
the .NET preview CDs, I also took home a copy of version
3.0 of the eMbedded Visual Tools.
Even though I am excited about VB.NET,
I have spent much more time working with eVB than VB.NET
since that last PDC. So, the highlight of this year's PDC
for me was, by far, receiving the technical preview copy
of the Compact Framework and the new smart device extensions
to Visual Studio .NET.
This year's PDC consisted of a Keynote
session by Bill Gates, 6 general sessions on various new
technologies, about 130 individual breakout sessions, from
which we were to choose 13 and a pre-conference day with
3 different all-day sessions to choose from. Combine that
with the Hands on Labs, the .Net Showcase Theater,
the Exhibit Hall, the social events, Ask the Experts
night and a variety of other activities and you had
more brain food on your plate than you could possibly hope
to find time for in five short days.
What follows is a glimpse of it all
from the perspective of a long time loyal VB developer with
a serious interest in the mobile space. Of the 130 breakout
sessions about 15 of them were mobile focused. Even after
taking into account scheduling conflicts, C++ focused sessions
and other issues, I still ended up filling over half of
my 13 time slots with mobile specific sessions. My pre-conference
choice was on VB.NET and the rest of my sessions were a
mix of things like VB.NET, ASP.NET, performance, security,
etc… Out of the 6 general sessions one was also strictly
about Devices and .NET.
So after all that, what did I walk away
with besides a new backpack, some CDs and a retail copy
of Windows XP?
New Tools Are Coming
VB developers are soon going to have
a far superior tool set for creating mobile apps and we
will eventually be able to say goodbye to eVB. Microsoft
will release a new version of the eMbedded tools, but version
4.0 will be eVC ++ only and will not include a new version
of eVB. While we are talking about eVC's new stuff, I should
also clear up that the recently announced Pocket PC 2002
SDK has nothing in it for eVB developers unless you are
looking to make API calls from eVB; it is also strictly
eVC focused. According to the answers I got at the show,
the 2002 SDK does not include any enhancement to any of
our controls or any other eVB specific support for the new
features in the 2002 OS. What is coming, however, is something
that may eventually help us forget how we have been overlooked
and treated as afterthoughts as eVB developers.
The Compact Framework and VB.NET
with Smart Device Extensions will give us back the power
we had in VB 6.0 and a whole lot more. For the most part
(with only a few exceptions as I understand it), we will
have the full functionality of VB.NET at our disposal to
develop apps targeted at the Pocket PC. We will jump from
a dysfunctional world, where we have a procedural coding
model and retrofitted VB Script, to full object-oriented
support with real inheritance and all the other OO functionality
supported in VB.NET. As a mater of fact, all of the language
enhancements sported by VB.NET pretty much come along for
the ride, including the likes of multi-threading. The few
exception items I mentioned above focus on the supported
common Framework API more so than actual language features.
The standard .NET Framework API needed to be trimmed down
in order to accommodate the more limited resources of smart
devices. The PPC version of the Compact Framework, however,
seems very rich. Some of the things that were trimmed out
to reduce the footprint are things like IIS web hosting
functionality, 3D graphics support and a variety of things
that many of us won't miss on the PPC. Don't get me wrong,
there will be things that at some point, for some application,
we will wish they decided to support, perhaps things like
Printing or Peer to Peer remoting. In general, the choices
that were made on what to support and what not to support
look good and I believe most VB developers will be very
pleased. Rich interface and user experience as well as developer
tool compatibility and productivity were apparently high
on the priority list when the decisions were made on how
to design and what to include in the compact framework.
For example, how many of you would like
to be able to create a decent PPC game with VB? In one session
I attended, the presenter showed a .NET/Compact Framework
demo with a dozen or so graphical bubbles bouncing around
and colliding on an iPAQ. He explained that the dev team
had not yet started to focus on performance optimization,
but I felt that with what he was showing we could finally
create an impressive gaming experience in VB and even VB
for the PPC. That bubbles demo is included on the CD's that
they gave us, but apparently the tech preview build that
we received will run slower than the build that he was using
for his demonstration. He assured us however, that they
fully expect even better performance by the time they get
to beta. I also spoke to someone at the Ask the Experts
session that told me about a version of Pac Man running
on a PPC that they developed internally at Microsoft with
.NET and the compact framework. Unfortunately, the Pac Man
demo is not included on the Tech Preview CD's for licensing
reasons.
No need to go back
For many of us, we will not need to
come back to eVB once we transition to the new tools. The
initial platforms supported by the new compact framework
include devices that currently use the PPC 2000 and the
PPC 2002 operating systems. They explained that the next
step would include support for the next generation of smart
phones and other devices like MSTV. There was even a hint
that we may be able to program the XBOX in the future. I
say this because in several different slides showing smart
devices products, PPC's were right there with smart phones,
MSTV, Win CE for automotive and the XBOX. My main point
however, is that you will be able to distribute .NET apps
and the Compact Framework for current Pocket PC devices
including the likes of the older models such as the Cassiopeia
E-115 that runs Pocket PC 2000. So, unless you need to target
a legacy client base that is using CE 2.0 devices you may
not have to look back. Even then, keep in mind that most
of those legacy devices will probably soon come out in newer
CE 3.0 or CE 4.0 versions with faster processors and new
functionality like built-in wireless connectivity.
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