San Francisco – March 24, 2004. Today was the official start of Microsoft’s Mobile Developer Conference with a keynote presentation of Bill Gates. The overall theme of the keynote presentation was “Developing seamless computing experiences”. Gates took a short look at the history over the past 3 decades. According to him, the 80’s were known for limiting hardware, making computing in general tough. In the 90’s the problems moved to hardware connections, getting networking to actually work. Right now, in the 00’s we are talking about software connections. Software talking to software anywhere, making use of techniques like XML-Schema. According to Gates building applications today is harder than any day before, because applications need to be aware of each other and communicate to each other over all kinds of different devices. This statement was somewhat surprising to me, given the power of current development tools. But Gates refined his statement a little, saying that this is mainly true when trying to make existing code aware of other applications. Also the variety of hardware makes it tough to allow applications to communicate to each other. Anything, from a SPOT device via a Smartphone and a PocketPC, up to large servers needs to exchange information. The good part is that connections are more or less standardized to IP, making a very challenging task at least a little bit simpler. Creating new applications is also a challenge according to Gates, because of high security demands and very high expectations of correct operation of applications. After this more or less philosophical introduction Bill Gates moved on to Visual Studio Whidbey. As from now, this product is officially named Visual Studio 2005 (note that the .NET part is dropped from the name). Visual Studio 2005 is a very major release of this development tool. The top theme will be web services, straight forward in writing. Making use of common scenario’s, applications require about half as much code as before, making extreme use of existing code and expressing functionality in a high level way. It is time to forget about all kinds of plumbing code, Visual Studio will take care of that, leaving us developers to concentrate on our own functionality. Visual Studio 2005 contains language and tool innovations. For VB developers it is great news to hear that Edit & Continue is back for debug sessions. Furthermore, version 2.0 of the .NET Framework will support iterators, generics, partial types (in C# only). Security still remains very important for Microsoft, it has a higher priority than adding functionality in new products. Along this line it will no longer be necessary for applications to require administrative mode for correct operation. User feedback is extremely important for Microsoft. Everybody most likely is aware of the fact that error reports are being send when an application malfunctions, of course only after user permission. To take user feedback one step further we have to take a look at the current version of Office, Office 2003. Whenever a user is online and requests help, help information is pulled from the web, not from the local machine. The online help information is updated each month, incorporating feedback of users, because the help system is actually asking users if help has been helpful.

During the keynote presentation, Gates moved on to mobile devices. According to him, the mobile device experience should be similar to the PC development experience. This is a big challenge, because so many different devices are around. Gates sees a trend for mobile devices: To combine Smartphone and PocketPC functionality to get the best of both worlds. My own personal opinion is that it would be great if all that functionality would actually be combined into one cool, good looking and powerful device. It turns out that the most innovation in devices is expected from Europe and Asia, the United States are somewhat behind in this area. To conclude the words Gates did spend on devices he gave some figures and an announcement. Right now there are 37+ device hardware manufacturers and 50+ telecom operators supporting the Windows Mobile (2003) platform. Microsoft has the largest PocketPC share and a growing Smartphone share. Of the in total 2.5 Million developers using Visual Studio there are around 380.000 windows mobile developers. Gates is convinced that mobile development will bring us the greatest opportunities in the nearby future. A keynote without an important announcement is not really a keynote. Today Bill Gates announced Windows Mobile 2003 2nd edition, an intermediate release of Microsoft’s mobile platform. It allows high resolution (VGA like) screens, changes in screen orientation (moving from portrait to landscape), different form factors and further device innovations. A new article on MSDN describes the possibilities of Windows Mobile 2003 2nd edition. To be able to develop applications for Windows Mobile 2003 2nd edition, it is possible to download new emulator images. It is necessary to have the PocketPC / Smartphone 2003 SDK’s already installed to be able to make use of these emulator images. They allow creating applications for Windows Mobile 2003 2nd edition devices with either embedded Visual C++ or with Visual Studio.NET 2003. So far some highlights of the keynote by Bill Gates. Tomorrow we dig deeper into device development, when the keynote by Chris Anderson, Ori Amiga and Seth Demsey will be centred on Visual Studio 2005 capabilities for devices.