This will be my last column for this year. Looking back, this has been a great year for developers that are working with Windows Mobile devices and with Windows CE in general. This became already clear during MEDC in Las Vegas, where more attendees showed up than ever before on a Mobile & Embedded developer conference. Besides that it was very cool to see lots of attention around mobile devices during large conferences as TechEd and PDC. The only conference that was sort of slower with regards to embedded and mobile development was WinHEC, but that must be because of the nature of this hardware oriented conference. Of course we had a major milestone just one month ago when Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 were released. It is incredible how time flies. It seems so far away already that I was using beta versions of both products, running inside a Virtual PC. Right now Visual Studio 2005 has a nice place on my development machine, in fact it is the only development environment I am using today, well, besides a little bit of playing around with Platform Builder. For me personally this was also the year in which I could present lots of Webcasts. Talking about taking off. I really think that Webcasts are taking off like a rocket, with more and more Webcasts being presented each week and more and more people attending. There is hardly any developer related subject that does not get coverage in one or more Webcasts. I presented 18 different Webcasts this year, moving gradually from multithreading to mobile development, even covering things like SQL Server Mobile Edition. One of my goals for next year will easily be met, presenting more Webcasts than in 2005. I guess a 13 part series that starts in January on developing a line-of-business application helps to reach that goal. The other goal will be harder to meet; getting more speaking opportunities during large international conferences. Of course everybody who reads this column can help. Just let conference organizers know that you want to attend presentations by me J. I do believe that 2006 will be a big break through for Windows Mobile devices. Finally Windows Mobile 5.0 devices are more or less widely available on the market, and boy, these devices are powerful and cool. The possibilities to develop cool applications for these devices are limitless. We have some great tools available, and making use of Web Services bring devices where they have not gone before. I am pretty sure that connectivity and location awareness will be important topics for the upcoming year. This will be a focal area on DotNETForDevices in the upcoming months as well. Another goal I have personally is to use my blog more frequent and to come up with a new bunch of articles, as well as getting more day to day news on the site. With the amount of work I had to finish over the last few months this was hardly possible. I guess I need to manage my time better, maybe an area where my brand new Windows Mobile 5.0 devices can help me. This has been the last column of this year. The upcoming weeks will still be busy, preparing the 13-part Webcast series on developing line-of-business applications for Mobile Devices in detail, writing abstracts for TechEd and MEDC presentations that are due at the beginning of January, finishing some stuff at the office and traveling to (hopefully) warm and sunny Phoenix, AZ for a week. Therefore, the next column will be published on this website at January 8, 2006. There is only one thing left to say. I hope everybody has a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Maarten Struys