Besides lots of seemingly negative things that are going right now and on which I cannot really comment there was this nice comment I read last week. Somebody downloaded a sample video that I created in November last year on how to develop your very first application for Windows Mobile Devices using Visual Studio 2008. This application is very, very basic, not really moving beyond a typical “Hello World” application. At the same time, the video might be interesting for starting developers because it not only shows you how to develop this little application, but probably more important, what additional tools you need, and where to find those. So in this video I even ended up installing the Windows Mobile 6 SDKs. Especially starting developers might not realize that the latest version of the application development environment does not contain the latest tools in the box that you need to target the most recent Windows Mobile Devices. That is all ok, but what we often seem to forget, calling ourselves “experienced”, is that there hopefully will be an on-going stream of starting developers interesting in targeting Windows Mobile. That in itself is already good news, more developers simply means more applications, thus means more functionality for our end users to choose from. More developers also mean that we are working on a platform that is alive and exiting. So here is that cheerful little note I received:

“Hey Friends
I am just trying to find out stuff about development for mobile, found that Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Java are the available options after searching on http://www.live.com . This Page with tabs are the best startup i have found. The Document Outlines to download SDK, then it gives link to video and source code, so that when i will be watching video, i will be able to pause it and have a look at the source code provided. This is really brilliant, never found such a fantastic page on microsoft site before. I am going to download the stuff , grab a tea, and then will study and will try to make best out of it. Hey Maarteen and team, thanks a lot for the brilliantest Page.”

Now comments like this one are not the reason for me personally to continue educating people to develop applications for Windows Mobile. I am just totally dedicated to the platform. However, comments like this are motivating me a lot to continue sharing my knowledge about Windows Mobile Application Development with the world. That is also the reason to soon start a series of videos in which I will develop an application from scratch and sharing literally my complete design experience with the world. You should expect the first video in that new series within the next two weeks and more content on a regular base. To get you started I have the getting started video that was the reason for somebody to write the above comment published on DotNETFor Devices as well. This video will be a great starting point to follow the series that is in the making right now. And trust me, in that series we will go way beyond developing a “Hello World” application.

Maarten Struys