During my current Webcast series about creating a managed Windows Mobile 5.0 line-of-business application, I got one particular kind of feedback from a number of attendees. Developers seem to be unhappy about the availability of books and sample code for both the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition. As far as samples are concerned, there are at least a number of samples available on MSDN, including a number of step-by-step articles that you can use to learn about these new products. I am also sure that it will be a matter of time until books about these topics will appear on the market. Of course it is hard for authors to keep up with the release schedule of new products. Even though I don’t have experience in writing books, it must be hard work. Then of course there is the simple fact that, as soon as your book is released, new versions of the products you are writing about are at least announced. Even though I like to have books available (I still prefer reading a book over reading articles online), I wonder if we have to think about books completely different. Maybe more people should team up to write books about software products to shorten writing time. Maybe books should be published in an electronic format. I do think something has to be changed. Of course I am not even starting to think about financial consequences for authors, but I do wonder if we are making enough use of modern ways of publishing like Wiki’s. Yes, I like to have a number of books on my desk. I don’t like to search hard for a number of different articles that I might need to do my work. I also think articles differ too much in quality and type of information. What I am particularly wondering is if the work that Mike Hall has done for Windows Embedded operating systems is useful for application developers as well. Mike has created a number of small presentations that are available for download, each one covering one particular topic, related to either Windows CE or Windows XP Embedded. The topics vary and range from an introduction level to rather advanced technical information. Maybe that is where we need to go, creating a number of short presentations on .NET Compact Framework developing and on SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition. The advantage is that it will not take as much time as writing a book to bring up to date information to developers. You can just spend a few minutes watching a small presentation on a topic you are interested in and, hopefully, it is possible to keep the information in sync with newly released products. These small presentations, or eHowTo’s and tutorials as Mike likes to call them, might be an interesting format to teach application developers about new technology as well. I need to think some more about it, also finding out how easy it is to create content. Hmmm, maybe I will talk to Mike or other people inside Microsoft about this to find out if we can deliver more, up-to-date, great training material to the whole developer community. After all, having good teaching material will also help making the Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded platforms more popular.