San Francsico – March 25, 2004. We are one day on our way. An important presentation was today’s keynote, all about current development for devices using Visual Studio.NET 2003 and a great look in the future, making use of Visual Studio 2005 together with v2.0 of the .NET Compact Framework, or in native code if you wish. At the last minute Chris Anderson had to take over from Don Box who couldn’t be here in San Francisco. A presentation with Chris Anderson, Ori Amiga and Seth Demsey is guaranteed to be entertaining and it sure was. These guys blew away the audience. Chris started by setting the tone of the presentation: “The Web sucks horrible for rich applications”. The point he was making is that the Web is just wonderful for easy deployment of applications but seriously lacks the richness of rich client applications, both for the desktop and for smart devices. According to him there is an enormous challenge right now. This is the time to write applications for smart devices, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

1. The current development tools (Visual Studio.NET 2003 and embedded Visual C++ 4.0) are great and give developers enormous power and productivity.
2. Microsoft commits itself to make smart devices premier targets in current and future development tools.
3. It is time for a super productive development platform.

To demonstrate productivity Chris Anderson was actually an ideal candidate. Working hard on Indigo, the communication part of Windows Longhorn, he has not written any code for devices until one week ago. Part of the presentation was a super cool video. I wish I could get my hands on that video to share it with everybody. It was a remake of the popular TV series “The Bachelor”. They renamed it to “The Programmer”. The whole idea was that a programming “stud” had to select two cool devices to date with. Among the devices to select from were Palm Pilote, Symby Ann, Smarty Phone and Parker PC. As you might guess, they were female versions of a number of devices. “The Programmer” had a hard time selecting, but decided that:

• Palm Pilote was too hard to handle
• Symby Ann was actually good looking but should have known .NET
• Smarty Phone was very young but good looking with a Compact Framework
• Parker PC was powerful and immediately started showing her API’s.

Of course the two latter devices won. The price was actually a sync cable for each of them, so they could sync up with “The Programmer”. It is too bad that these words can not even describe this hilarious video.

During the remainder of the keynote Chris, Seth and Ori showed a lot of code. What is remarkable is that, even though the current development tools are already very powerful, things will really get great with Visual Studio 2005. It almost seems that no matter what functionality is required, we only have to come up with between 1 and 3 lines of code to achieve everything we want. Is this the end of programming? Of course not! During a keynote presentation lots of things are simplified, but it became very clear that our productivity will again dramatically increase in the future (we already saw the same thing happening with the arrival of the .NET Compact Framework, exactly one year ago). This is actually a very good thing, since we can more concentrate on desired functionality and less on all kinds of plumbing code. This can only mean that applications will get cooler and cooler.

Tomorrow is the last day of MDC. Since I am scheduled for an OpenNETCF.org presentation tomorrow afternoon, there is probably no chance of attending other presentations. After all, the OpenNETCF presentation needs to be “perfect”. This means preparing all morning and talking in the afternoon. Therefore, this is the second and already last article from MDC. Make sure to check my weblog to find out how that presentation went and don’t forget the next column in which we will look back at MDC.