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The Mobile Ecosystem
The first morning's keynote was given
by Juha Christensen, VP of MS Mobility Group. I know,
I know the picture below is a bit deprived of appropriate
light but my excuse is that I bought a new Canon Powershot
S40 digital camera the day before the conference. If you
can't see him you will just have to take my word that Juha
is somewhere on that dark stage (you can even click on it
for larger darker version). [Update 5/1/2002 - Thanks
to Donald Race for providing the touched up version of the
pic below.] Anyway Juha is one of my favorite speakers and
he did his mobile ecosystem and network convergence speech.
I say that with a certain degree of familiarity, only because
I heard him give a very similar speech last September at
the MS Mobius event. Basically Juha makes a compelling case
that we will see large scale network convergence; between
public networks, LANs, WANs and wireless networks. In the
future you won't really know whether you are using GPRS
or 802.11 (or passthrough) all you will know is that you're
connected. Based on the 3 days it took me to troubleshoot
my GPRS configuration I hope that's true; I think this integration
will happen but it will take some time. In many ways it's
not as "pie in the sky" as it sounds just look
at how much momentum 802.11x has built up in the last year.
We also finally have Bluetooth devices shipping as well
as an attractive $5 and under unit fee for Bluetooth chips.
Juha made several important anouncements,
two in particular were of primary interest to me. First
he anounced the release of the .NET
Compaft Framework beta; which was handed out the following
morning at the next keynote speech; and secondly he anounced
the launch of the Mobile2Market
initiative, "a new framework which enables a process
for the certification and market delivery of network-ready
wireless applications for the Windows® Powered Pocket
PC and Smartphone software platforms".
Now if you have followed any of Carl
Davis' series on Building
a better world with Windows CE logo certification you
would be equally excited with this development. To date
I don't think I have ever seen Windows CE logo certification
on a product so this is obviously an area that needed to
be addressed. The Mobile2Market initiative should
bring together the carrier operators and independent software
developers (ISV's). The benefits to the mobile operators
are pretty clear - as you can imagine mobile operators are
eager to have some form of application integrity check,
ensuring the mobile application is virus free and behaves
in a appropriate fashion - before they open their bandwidth
sensitive networks to mobile smart device applications.
On the ISV side, although the promise of carrier referrals
sounds sweet, I think the relationship will be one sided
unless the real underlying co-operation of ISV's using mobile
operator billing systems and these operators sharing revenue
with content providers takes off. In that instance we will
have a win-win. Quality
Logic and Veritest
wil be performing the Designed for Windows Pocket PC logo
testing.
Hand On Labs
There were some great hands on sessions
at the Mobility Developers Conference.
- Lab 1 - Building a Mobile Web
Application Using the Mobile Internet Toolkit
- Lab 2 - Programming the Pocket
PC 2002 with Embedded Visual C++®
- Lab 3 - Using the .NET Compact
Framework and Smart Device Extensions
- Lab 4 - Creating PocketPC application
with Smart Device Extensions (SDE), ADO.NET and SQL Server
CE
My favorite would have to be the Creating
PocketPC application with Smart Device Extensions (SDE),
ADO.NET and SQL Server CE lab session. Kevin Collins
walked us through the creating the application using merge
replication to grab the data from a SQL Server 2000 server.
The lab equipment and organization was excellent. As you
can well imagine it's no mean feat to run this sort of training
session with a bunch of fast fingered developers poking
and prodding the tires of your new development environment.
Again remember this is the beta environment too! In this
session we convered the following exercises:
- Exercise 1: Visual tour of Integrated
Development Environment
- Exercise 2: Let's Build an Application
User Interface
- Exercise 3: Emulation - Running
our application for the first time
- Exercise 4: Adding SQL Server CE
and ADO.NET code to the application
- Exercise 5: Discussing Error Handling
- Exercise 6: Debugging your Application
- Exercise 7: Running your Application
on a Target Device
- Exercise 8: Using ISQLWCE on the
device
- Exercise 9: (Optional) Create a
Deployable Package of the Application
This was an excellent example of using
SQL Server CE in collaboration with .NET Compact Framework.
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