November 7, 2005 is an important day for software developers. Today the long awaited Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 are launched. This is an important milestone. Software development will be easier than ever before thanks to some very powerful development tools. Finally it is possible to have only one development environment for both managed and native software development for Windows Mobile devices, that is, if they are running Windows Mobile 5.0 or the previous version, 2003 (SE). Visual Studio 2005 is a pleasure to work with. This development environment will raise your productivity dramatically. However, it is important to get familiar with everything that is in the box. It is definitely worth exploring Visual Studio 2005 in some details and get familiar with its capabilities. After all, investing time in a tool that you probably will use during large portions of your working days will benefit you. Particularly cool for device developers is the brand new device emulator, now running ARM code. It is also very easy to cradle the device emulator so you can test synchronization scenarios using the emulator. It almost seems unnecessary to have a physical device at hand to start developing for smart devices. At the same time, I have moved testing applications from the emulator to a real device connected via ActiveSync. My main reason for doing so is performance. Especially when debugging, single stepping through code, running the code on a real device improves performance a lot. But even more important is exploring the new features of Visual Studio 2005. You should take a look at the extra functionality available in the .NET Compact Framework 2.0. If you are targeting Windows Mobile 5.0 devices, take a look at the new managed API’s for those devices as well, even though they are not really part of Visual Studio 2005. As a matter of facts, you have to download and install the Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK’s separately after installing Visual Studio 2005. This separate installation of the Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK’s is about the only thing I don’t like about Visual Studio 2005. It would have been nice to have these SDK’s shipped as part of Visual Studio 2005 and installed together with everything else. Getting back to the title of this column then. It is obvious that Microsoft is very happy about launching these products. During the whole month of November, lots of launch events are organized world wide. Today is immediately the biggest and most important day, with Steve Ballmer officially launching the products. Too bad I am not in San Francisco for that event. Even when I would be there, it would still have been impossible to hear Ballmer speak. Even during the launch of these products, we continue educating the developer community about SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 with a lot of MSDN Webcasts. Therefore I have the honor to speak at the same time when Ballmer is introducing the new products to a large audience. The difference is that my job is not glamorous. Speaking from my own office, surrounded by a couple of devices and a development machine, equipped with a head set but all alone. I can only hope that there are some people left to tune in to our Webcast. Especially if you want to learn more about new C# 2.0 features that you can use for device development. Anyway, I want to give Visual Studio 2005 a big welcome (yes, of course, SQL Server 2005 as well). Until the next version of Visual Studio will be released it will be one of my best friends.

Maarten Struys