New Orleans, March 19, 2003 - Today the conference really took off. A remarkable thing is the amount of presentations that will cover the .NET Compact Framework during this conference. It is clear that Microsoft really starts promoting this technology. During the panel discussion “Choosing the right technologies for Mobile Application needs” it became clear that today mainly two different development environments exist. On one hand it is possible to write device applications with eVC++ 3.0. It is recommended to use this development environment when performance of applications is absolutely essential. Also device developers will need this environment to be able to write device drivers. On the other hand application developers will use the .NET Compact Framework more and more to write managed applications. It became clear that in the vision of Microsoft Embedded Visual Basic is no longer a language of choice. For backwards compatibility the next version of PocketPC (code named Ozone) will support eVB applications, but the eVB runtimes will no longer be available in ROM. This means that eVB applications on such devices must also deploy the eVB runtime. There will be no eVB 3.0 support for Ozone application development. To develop native applications for these new devices eVC++ 4.0 has to be used, managed applications can be developed with Visual Studio.NET.

During the introduction presentation about the .NET Compact Framework it became clear that presenter Graig Neable really believes in platform independency. Not for user interfaces or for low level data access, but for all kinds of business components and user interface controls multi platform development just works great. Key to successfully develop for multiple platforms is to use the .NET Compact Framework as a starting point, since the .NET CF is a subset of the desktop .NET Framework. Since both device applications and desktop applications use the same compiler, this is possible. The generated Intermediate Language for device and desktop is the same. The only difference is the fact that device applications refer to different assemblies used on the device. However, when a smart device application is executed on the desktop, the Common Language Runtime exchanges those specific assemblies by the proper desktop versions. The .NET Compact Framework is a subset of the .NET Framework. It is less then 10% of the size of the full .NET Framework. Basically, everything that is small and fast in the .NET Framework is included in the .NET CF as well. Because of the nature of devices, all server side classes have been omitted. During the presentation it became clear that much effort has been put into making the life of developers easier. Using the .NET Compact Framework results in much higher programmer productivity compared to using native Win32 API’s. Neable announced that two currently missing controls will be available in a future version of the .NET CF, a calendar object and a date-time control.

The final event of today was Bill Gates’ keynote. For an audience of around 3000 people, attendees of the Mobility Developer Conference and attendees of CTIA, Gates started talking about the history of computing. He talked about the digital decade that we are in right now. Gates visions great opportunities for early adaptors of mobile devices, both in the software and hardware development areas. Despite the current economic situation mobile devices will become popular and Microsoft fully commits to smart device development. According to Gates, mobile development will become big: "We want to make it easy for the 7 million Windows developers to build applications and services for the emerging wireless data market by providing familiar, yet customized tools," Gates said. "It's truly an exciting time for mobile application developers and the industry -- there are incredible opportunities." Gates compared the first Mobility Developer Conference with the first Windows Developer Conferences, over a decade ago. The tools are available but lots of efforts will be put in making those tools richer and more user friendly. "Major computing trends have always been driven by software developers, and the same will be true for mobile computing," Gates said. With .NET, Microsoft has solutions available for all kinds of devices. That this can be put into extreme became clear with a demonstration of SPOT (Smart Personal Object Technology). The watch-like device was shown with a black and white display of limited size, 120 / 92 pixels.