At work we are in the process of evaluating enterprise mobility platforms. An unified platform that help make enterprise data available to mobile devices or computers. When i evaluate candidates begin to have a look at the integration engine. How will the integration engine help me get hold of the data i require. At a minimum the engine must have connectors to the most common back-end systems like SAP, Dynamics, Agresso, Siebel and/or Oracle and also provide ways of more generic connectors through web services, XML etc. If you don´t have this; you´ve failed!
If you got step one – integration, you´ve come a very long way! You now need to make sure that the system is capable og keeping the flow of data to and from the devices. Handle distribution of software and updates, Manage the devices within the enterprise and keep it secure in an integrated manner. Oh, software..That is important! The software must be possible to develop without too much of a hassle. Don´t constrain the possibilities within an already constrained mobile platform (ie javaME or .NET Compact Framework). Don´t force the look and feel.
A few days ago i picked up a tweet by Rob Tiffany at Microsoft, he blogged about Microsoft MEAP – Mobile Enerprise Application Platform. MEAP is a platform where you design toghether a set of well known Microsoft technologies, and together they make up a unified mobile application platform. [Read more →]
It had to come and competition is great. We are seeing more of 3rd party application stores for mobile solutions. Freeware Pocket PC has opened up an alternative application store for Windows Phones promising instant free downloads for your Windows Mobile phone. OpnMarket is compatible with most of the Windows Mobile Professional devices with touch-screens, once installed it lets you browse, download and install FREE applications directly on your device. OpnMarket will use your mobile network connection or a WiFi connection to download software to your phone. It’s simple, instant and FREE with access to more than 6,700 free windows mobile games, tools and themes.
The installer cab can be downloaded from here.
Planning has started for the second Windows Phone Developer Community meetup. The meetup topic wil be usability and UX on small screen devices. We have contacted a highly skilled UX professional and he’ll be giving a 45-60 minutes speak on the topic.
We would also like to have an application showcase that shows the use of good UX and are open for suggestions from users and developers. If you are a developer and would like to show off you app at the meetup, don’t hesitate, get in touch with us.
The meetup will take place in Oslo in the beginning of March.
Does the blogging activity of the Microsoft compact framework development team reflect it’s development activity?
I sure hope not because then they haven’t been up to much since august 2009. The .NET compact framework team blog should have been a driving force for information about windows phone development, but is just quite anoyingly “dead”. Another blog hosted by blog.msdn.com called “The team blog for the mobile developer group“ shows the last posting from December 2008 as it’s last post.
With all the hammering MS is getting from everywhere about it’s mobility strategy and development, are they giving up? is the battle lost?
Does anyone know of other official blog channels from Microsoft on the compact framework or Windows Phone? please let me know! [Read more →]
The day we have been waiting for is finally here. Someone published malware in an appstore, and to no surprise it was published to the Android Marketplace. Norwegian newspaper Digi.no has written/translated an article form The Register about an phishing application written to hijack your banking account information.
This was bound to happen, and this is whythere is such a strict regime to submit applications into appstores like the Apple AppStore and the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Today’s smartphones are trusted devices and the general public does not yet think of their mobile phone as a device that needs antivirus, firewall and malware detection software. But as long as there are vendor solutions like the Android Marketplace; where there is no quality control and no reviewing of applications except for the user feedback from those who already have been fooled by such applications i think things will get a lot worse before it gets better. [Read more →]
Qtek 9090 Pocket PC
This was fun. While looking around for some cables i found one of my first ever Windows Mobile phones. An ancient Qtek 9090 Microsoft PocketPC phone.
I remember when i got it I was stoked on how cool this phone was 
32bit Intel PXA263 CPU with a blazing speed of 400MHz. a 3.5″ Transflective TFT-LCD screen, a camera, WiFi and bluetooth. And the QWERTY keyboard was actually quite good to use for SMS’ing and emails. [Read more →]
When it comes to application development on the Windows Phone platform things are on the move. Lessons are being learned from the iPhone and its usability experience, from the Android platform etc. The lesson learned is that you need to pay extra attention to how your application looks and feel.
You should not under estimate the possibility of usability and design being the selling point in a purchase decisions before feature richness in a case where two similar featured apps are compared, where one looks and feels good, and the other has an extra amount of features beyond the core functionality it should handle.
As i am on the look out for a UI toolkit to standardize our enterprise development at work on I´ll compile a list of libraries that could do the job as i find them. The criteria for the search is ease of use and finger friendliness. Hopeful others also find this list useful. [Read more →]
If you are in Oslo, and you’re a developer that do Windows Phone software development, or are curious about what’s in it you should come to the December meetup for Windows Phone Developer Community.
WPDC has it’s first meetup next Thursday on December 3rd. at 6 pm. The meeting will be held at NITH, located in Grønland.
View Schweigaards gate 14 in a larger map
In this first meetup we want to use more as a “constitutional” meeting. Getting to know those who are interested in Windows Phone development and most importantly find others who are interested in being “driving forces” and help build the community. [Read more →]
To help spawn some better facebook apps and services on the Windows Phone platform someone has proposed support for compact framework as a new feature to the Facebook developer kit.
Visit the proposition site and sign in with your CodPlex or create an account and vote for this.
It’s needed
It´s funny… In March 09 i wrote about a “work person” exiting the elevator saying that “Scrum doesn´t work on large scale Oracle projects“. Now, 9 month later i found myself about to try just that.
For most of this fall i have been working as the lead architect for a large (I call it large when it is designed to handle 45 000 000 transactions/week) national tracking system for the food industry in Norway based on the EPC IS standard. We evaluated the requirements and landed on Oracle as a technology partner.
After beating IBM in a close head2head BID race for the system we ´re now ready to begin the project initialization process and we have through the whole process had the goal to use scrum as project methodology. We have put together a great team of highly skilled engineers and developers and we know that there are two fixed factors, price and project end date. This is going to be fun! [Read more →]
