It feels like good old television. Having a vacation break for something like 3 months or so. Well, your favorite TV series should return with their next season again soon, so is this column on dotNETforDevices. Just like a new season on TV, this website should have something new to offer as well. Of course we make sure to cover familiar things, like developing applications in managed code for Windows CE based devices. Besides that, we will try a few new things as well. First off, finally, we are launching a newsletter each month with information on device development. You can expect the first newsletter in two weeks or so, that is, if you have registered here. Secondly, a wish coming true from my side, the website has to change a little for this, but you can expect short code samples, downloadable as streaming video, giving you information on developing software for Windows CE based devices. Right now we are producing a number of samples, covering topics like “Using Windows Mobile 5.0 API’s”, “Developing multithreaded applications using the .NET Compact Framework”, “COM Interoperability with the .NET Compact Framework”, “Real-time behavior of the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 with Windows CE 6.0”, “Writing your first ‘Hello world!’ application for a SmartPhone”, “Using Visual Studio in combination with Platform Builder”, “The difference between ResultSets and DataSets”, “Using Form Inheritance to write less code” and so on. I would also like to open the floor to you. If you are interested in a particular demo, please let me know by sending an email. These demo’s will hopefully be innovating. What we will try is splitting up a particular topic in a number of demonstrations, so you can download those demo’s you are really interested in without having to watch tons of other things you already know. Hopefully we can get you up to speed with little 10 minute demo’s. Oh, if you want to watch all of them you can of course do that as well. Over the upcoming weeks we will change the appearance of dotNETforDevices a little bit to be able to have all downloadable demo’s available for you. We start off by exploring the Windows Mobile 5.0 Managed API’s but more samples will follow. This is just another reason to put dotNETforDevices to your list of favorite websites. It took some time to really be back, but in the upcoming months you will get tons of free information on how to develop (managed) applications for Windows CE powered devices using Platform Builder, Visual Studio 2005 and, if necessary, using embedded Visual C++ 4.0. And of course the weekly column is back for the upcoming year as well. I started this column with “It feels like good old television”. Well, maybe I was spoiled a little by two episodes I recorded for MSDN TV. If you want to get an introduction in Developing for Devices or in accessing Pocket Outlook, just click through the links. This was a start but there is much more to follow. Just check back regularly again to this website.

Maarten Struys