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No port to call home
Porting your eVb apps to Visual Basic
.NET is not a very interesting story, nor is it generally
a desirable road to follow. The migration path is pretty
much a rewrite. The good news here is that the many of the
new benefits of moving from eVB as we know it to the robust
world of VB .NET on the compact framework will likely be
motivation enough to rewrite many PPC applications. Plus,
eVB apps will still run on the PPC devices for the foreseeable
future side by side with the .NET apps. The recommendation
was that if your current eVB application does what you want,
seriously consider leaving it as is and go into maintenance
mode for that application.
If you are looking to write new
applications or significantly enhance existing ones you
will likely want to consider writing them with the new .Net
tools when available. In the meantime pay special attention
to the ways that you isolate business logic and watch for
best practices papers from Microsoft and others over the
coming months.
Odds and ends
Many of the conference sessions went
much deeper into different topics than I could ever hope
to cover in a few pages, but here are a few other points
that I felt were worth mentioning and might be of interest
to some of you.
Bill Gates himself stood on stage and
sang praise and support for the 802.11 family of wireless
connectivity standards. I don't think I heard Blue Tooth
mentioned even once while I was at the conference. There
were 21 wireless hubs setup throughout the convention center
providing attendees with wireless access to the conference
network and to the Internet throughout the week. More evidence
that wireless is finally coming of age.
Tablet PC form factors are coming out
next year with built-in wireless connectivity and sophisticated
speech and handwriting recognition capabilities. They will
actually run a full XP version of the OS, so programming
applications for that platform will be every bit as rich
as any normal desktop application will a few additional
bells and whistles like "ink" objects. They look
like the first generation of a device that may actually
replace the pad and pencil in many a meeting room. A Tablet
SDK was released at the conference.
Star Trek Future
The last general session of the conference
was a glimpse into the future presented by the MS Research
division. Did you know Microsoft actually has scientists
working on quantum state teleportation, mems (nanotechnology)
and artificial intelligence? MS Research will spend 75 million
on research and education this year and is responsible for
advancing technology and making contributions to virtually
all products in the Microsoft stable including incubating
some that are close to home for us like Windows CE, and
eBook. The main theme of this presentation was "Breaking
down the Barriers". We are at an inflection point
with computing technology where we will soon break through
previous limitations of technology and challenge what we
consider is rationale. Some of the fast approaching milestones
include: computer graphics attaining similar or superior
fidelity to reality, almost unlimited storage capacity where
regular PCs have Terabyte storage, and almost unlimited
bandwidth with WAN technology currently doubling its bandwidth
capacity ever 6 months. MS Research is working at finding
ways to use these advances in technology to break down barriers
between people, people and computers, people and information,
computing environments like work, car and home, as well
as breaking down barriers between individual computers.
Some of the very interesting demonstrations showcased their
work in natural question input, XBOX graphics capabilities,
and life-like speech synthesis to name just a few.
When is the future?
MS Research sees many of the technology
breakthroughs mentioned above as coming as soon as the next
5 to 10 years. If fact, it is estimated that the Terabyte
PC may be available in the 2004/2005 time frame. That is
enough storage apparently to record every word you speak
in your entire lifetime with room left over to index it
all. However, in the near future you can expect to see new
versions of developer tools coming out. Bill stated on stage
that we should see Visual Studio .NET released before the
end of the year. I spoke to a number of Microsoft people
who gave dates for when we might expect to see the first
beta release and the eventual RTM release of the Smart Device
Extensions and the Compact Framework. It sounds like the
beta is planned for February 2002 and the release may be
as soon as the later part of the first half of 2002.
Try it yourself
If you are anxious to get your hands
on the .NET Compact Framework and the Smart Device Extensions,
but didn't make it to PDC this year, they are available
for download or order from the Microsoft MSDN web site.
You will also need the Release Candidate version (Not Beta
2) of Visual Studio that they released at PDC to use with
the extensions. Note that the Smart Device Extensions do
not yet have a forms designer shipping with them. The forms
designer is in the works for the next release, but in the
mean time there is a work around. You can cheat a little
and create your form in a VB.NET project, then cut and paste
the code into your PPC project. This works because .NET
Windows.Forms do not have binary files or text files containing
metadata to describe them. Instead Windows.Forms are created
totally within code. The code you paste in from your VB.NET
project will likely contain a couple of lines that will
cause errors when you compile in your PPC project. Simply
remove those offending lines and you are off to the races.
http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/nextgen/beta.asp
Two thumbs up!
For any programmer out there that does
this stuff for a living, I highly recommend the PDC conference
experience. I find that the quality of the presenters is
very high. Usually the person presenting is a person who
was directly involved in the development of the particular
technology they are talking about. In general, they also
tend to have really good presentation skills, which anyone
who has sat through both a good and a bad presentation can
tell you that the presenter's abilities on stage can make
a world of difference in what you get out of a session.
The direct access to many of the key players from Redmond
is almost worth the trip in and of itself. Every year there
is an evening called Ask the Experts where you are
fed (both mind and body) and given a chance to sit down
and ask questions or have casual conversation with what
seems to be hundreds of technical people, presenters and
others from the front lines at Microsoft. The 6000 + people
who attended this years PDC where well fed, entertained
and provided for during their week in LA and had a chance
to catch a glimpse of where Microsoft is heading and get
answers on many technical issues straight from the horse's
mouth. I always find that PDC is really good value for my
money.
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