I didn’t’ even realize this before looking up some historic facts, but this year I will celebrate my 20th year using Microsoft Windows as an operating system. It all started for me with Windows/386. At that time you could hardly speak about Windows as being an operating system, since Windows itself ran on top of MS-DOS. Application development at that time was interesting to say the least. We were worrying about Hungarian Notation for our applications, written in C using the Win16 SDK. We were also struggling with pointer arithmetic, who remembers those nice issues you could have with offset and segment pointers? At that time I surely loved my Borland development tools. Things changed rapidly over the years. A significant improvement was moving to the NT code base, at least we got a consistent 32 bit address space and Microsoft’s development tools started to improve as well, as a matter of facts, over the years I started to like them over the good old Borland development tools I was so fond off. Taking a big jump in time, when I was playing a lot with the earlier versions of Windows CE, I was totally astonished around 2000 when Microsoft unveiled information about .NET. This would change the world of Windows programming dramatically. I jumped on the wagon and remember wearing my orange “C# is cool” t-shirt day and night (with many thanks to the folks of Develop Mentor who were so nice to give me that t-shirt that I still have around somewhere). These were the good old days when I yearly traveled to Davos, Switzerland for the annual WinSummit, a high quality developer conference in a beautiful setting with folks like Jeff Richter, David Solomon and Doug Boling giving great talks. At that time I was daydreaming away, hoping to be able to speak at conferences one day as well. However, when .NET was introduced I couldn’t wait to get started, so I was very thrilled to write my first “Hello world” application using Visual Studio.NET. I was amazed at programmer productivity; it took me only five seconds to write this application. Comparing that to my original “Hello world” attempt under Windows/386, that took about 5 days to get it working. Lots of things have changed in the last 5 years or so. The .NET environment became extremely popular and we even got our own little version of it for Windows CE, the .NET Compact Framework. For the last couple of years, all my development work has been around managed code. Not only that, my dream at the days of WinSummit became true as well, since I am now regularly speaking at conferences like MEDC, Tech Ed and Mobile Connections. I am really curious about the future right now. It looks like the smart thing to do right now is invest in getting familiar with things like Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation. First of all to really get ready to develop applications for Windows Vista, but these technologies will most likely appear for other operating systems as well. For instance, we will have WCF support for Windows CE powered devices with the arrival of Visual Studio 2008. So my bet until last week was to stick with managed code. Until I got in touch with a company developing applications for Windows Mobile powered Smartphones. It turns out that they are developing native applications and they want some training around it. They got in touch with me, and I decided I would take up the challenge. So right now I am back into native development, preparing a workshop for developers using native code to target Windows Mobile devices. I would have never thought this would happen, but it is a lot of fun, being back to the basics. I will not give up my true passion, managed application development. Nor will I give up my next dream, writing device drivers in managed code. However, it is a nice distraction, moving back to native code. This column is the last one before my vacation break. There is still a lot of work and traveling to do over the next two weeks before I can finally take a flight to the south western part of the USA for a whole wopping 10 vacation days. Anyway, if you meet me during one of our MSDN Webcasts, or during a conference, you now have some background information about me. The next column on DotNETForDevices will be published on August 26. If there is important information to share with you until that time, I will make sure to publish it on my blog. I wish everybody a great and safe vacation.
Maarten Struys |
