Stumbled across Charlie Kindels latest blog entry, posted yesterday. Kindel is the Partner Group Program Manager for the Windows Phone Application Platform & Developer Experience and he writes about what looks like the first official statement prior to the MIX10 conference that takes place in Vegas in a week or so.

In the post he confirms that there will be a clean cut from Windows Phone 6.X and Windows Phone 7. There will be some cases where apps developed for 6 will work on 7 but all in all… the Windows.Forms way of doing phone applications is dead.

I encourage you to read the full post, he also explains why quite well. Continue Reading

Fun from the archives! – While going through some old backups at home i found my very first application for a mobile device.

In 2003 i released a solution that I called “NT Services”. The goal was to have an easy access tool to information about a range of servers in a LAN, from anywhere. It was created with web interfaces working for most graphical browsers (Win/*nix/Mac), PocketPC powered PDA’s, and any device that can use the Opera Software SSR (Small Screen Rendering) browser. 

I had at the time just begun to use .NET and C# as my development environment, but because I wanted to get this done fast (I was going on summer vacation and needed access to hosted servers)  and i had 5 years previous experience with Visual Basic, I wrote it using Visual Basic for COM objects and did web and server side code using VBScript. This also became the last thing I ever wrote using this. Continue Reading

10 days to go and i am off. Tickets and hotel are booked and i am going to Las Vegas and the Mandalay Hotel & Casino for the MIX10 conference.

After the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona i am really looking forward to get a deep dive into the development capabilities of the new OS.

With me I’ll bring along a Canon 5D Mark II camera for snapshots and i’ll post updates as soon as time permits. Continue Reading

Windows Phone and Mobile developers are waiting for Microsoft to reveal the development environment for the new WPO7 Series platform. This will happen at the MIX 2010 conference in Las Vegas 14. – 17. March. Until then Microsoft employees find themselves “hunted down” for information and leaks on what to come.

Leaks are starting to spill out and wmpoweruser.com and engadget.com has released leaked documents on development guidelines and policies.

While reading this i can finally ”confirm”  that WPO7 Series is based on Windows CE 6. For us developers this is great news! Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

I am happy to see that Microsoft are working on an updated version of their 70-540 exam for Windows Mobile 5.0 application development. -It’s given the certification number 70-580 and is named TS: Windows Mobile 6.5, Application Development. It currently ”in development” and due as i understand it for release March 18, 2010.  From the list of “Skills being measured” in this exam it looks like Microsoft has put a bit more thought into what you actually need to learn before you venture into compact framework development.  If they at the same time upgrade the Microsoft Mobile Developer Handbookboth the exam and book will be a great starting point for new mobile application developers.

I hope that there will be a certification upgrade possibility for those of us that already has the 70-540  certification.

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

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. Continue Reading

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

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. Continue Reading