The MSDN Live tour is open for registration with a great program this year! The tour will be going to Stavanger on April 16th, Trondheim on April 20th, Bergen April 23rd and Oslo April 26th.

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Windows Phone Developer Community meetup has been scheduled for Thursday March 4th. It will be held at The Scotsman downtown Oslo.

Speakers for the evening is Frank Dahle, usability expert and designer. He’s “mantra” of “Mobile design is to mobilize – not to miniaturize” is something i strongly believe in and are looking forward to help spread. keywords for Frank’s talk will be; Design is how it works -not how it looks, understanding the user, design for flow and the next generation of mobile apps.

The second speaker(s) for the evening is Ronny Gydar and Trine Nesland of Gydar Industries and developers of the norwegian windows mobile program series “TrineSeries”.  They will be talking about their applications, how and why they started and about the technology behind their applications.

We are also lucky enough to have Kristine Bjørnstad who is the acting Windows Phone Lead at Microsoft Norway to come tell us more about the Microsoft headlines announced at MWC (Mobile World Congress) Continue Reading

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! Continue Reading

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. Continue Reading

Today was a cool day!

Finally the Windows Phone Developer Community is announced and started. I was attending a developer presentation for Windows Mobile 6.5 and Microsoft Marketplace today and just before we broke for lunch i was called to stage to “tell the world” that on Thursday 3. December 2009 we´ll host the first meeting.

This first meetup will be mostly about getting to know each other, and find out who´s interested in becoming driving forces. It is not to be taken lightly that if this is to have any form of success it needs to have support and contribution from developers.

For the occasion we have set up a meetup.com group to handle “members” and announcement of meeting events, so check it out at http://www.meetup.com/Windows-Phone-Developer-Community/. Continue Reading

EDIT: a step closer now: http://agilemobility.net/2009/10/15/getting-the-developer-community-up-and-running/

Norwegian? Want to help create a developer community? I need your help!

What I miss is having a developer community like i had when i did regular .net work. I miss seeing technology relevant sessions on MSDN Live or NDC and i want to do something about it. Maybe even a MSDN Mobile event?

Who am I? Continue Reading

NDC looks very promising this year, but as always.. i’ll be whining about the lack of mobility content on arrival.

Bit  sad since with the release of WM 6.5 Microsoft have the opportunity to present the new development features like gestures, touch and widgets to developers eager to get a glimpse into newTech. And also with the launch of Microsoft Marketplace for mobile, independent and commercial developers have a centralized distribution channel making it easier than ever to finally be able to get some hard earned return for the effort.

So far i’ve pinned these sessions:

• Tim Huckaby – Jump into WPF! … and become immediately effective.
• Michael Feathers – Working Effectively with legacy code
• Ayende Rahien – Producing production quality software
• Ian Griffiths – Writing custom WPF pixel shader effects
• Phil Haack – The Haacked and Hanselman show (this might be fun )
• Glenn Block – Framework design guidelines
• Ayende Rahien – Building scalable systems
• Roy Osherove – Introducing CTHRU
• Robert C. Martin – Clean Code
• Robert C. Martin – Clean Design
• Ted Neward – XML Messaging in .NET using WCF
• Mary Poppendieck – The lean frame
• Mike Cohn – User stories
• Mike Cohn – Agile estimating
• Mike Cohn – Agile Planning

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After years, Jonathan Noble has had it. In a long letter to a dear friend and companion he had to lay out the reasons - trying to explain why it is necessary to part for both of them to grow as mobile users.

No matter how ironic written, it’s got quite a spike of truth to it. Is Windows Mobile 6.5 coming to late?  Are we as developers soooo stuck in the winform of stylus usage (kill the datagrid) ?  Are we unable see and think of new ways of developing software – mere copycats?

I hope not! I hope that with the release of 6.5 and the implementation of gestures and touch controls, we will get the toolbox we need to drive the innovation further beyond single process apps and copy/paste.

Loke Uei Tan and John Bruno had a session at Mix09 on Windows Mobile 6.5 if your are interested in having a look at how it works and the services launched with it. They are talking about features, the new UI and also about the Windows Mobile application marketplace.

I am not quite sure, but i think Luke Uei about 30 seconds into the presentation mentioned august 09 as planned release month. I am really looking forward to this release and hope i heard it right.

“Death to the stylus” – It’s also good to see that Microsoft finally has understood that the stylus is a really, really bad usability thing. And that lists and screens are now navigable from your fingertip (the most natural stylus of all). Continue Reading