Kivanc Ozuolmez

There is some good news with the updated marketplace policies:

• You still have to pay a registration free which entitles you to 5 free app submissions
• But any further “paid for” app submissions are free
• Only “free” app submissions have a cost associated
• Also MS are introducing the Trial API
• Includes the Push Notification service.

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/

 

This series of Web seminars will lead you through common application development scenarios in Windows Mobile 6.5. From “hello world” to embedded databases, from sending a simple SMS messages to using the new touch-screen enabled Gesture APIs, these sessions will get you started developing custom applications for your Windows Mobile 6.5 device.

 

Link is here

 

Couple of days ago Alex Yakhnin posted a nice brain storming article on RIAs and Mobile Devices, here. If you think about the Silverlight functionalities we have now and having them on a limited mobiel device....

That's explains a lot why we still don't know anything about Silverlight on mobile.

The Office Mobile 2010 offering is part of yesterday's release of the overall Office 2010 beta, which offers publicly downloadable versions of Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Project 2010, Visio 2010, and Office Web Apps. The products are touted as delivering "the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser."

 

 

According to Microsoft, Office Mobile 2010 (above) includes mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and the new SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010. The software is claimed to allow transfer of documents to and from desktop PCs while preserving rich formatting, such as tables, charts, font styles, and SmartArt graphics. Excel Mobile 2010 now provides more than 140 formulas, several previously only found in desktop Excel, the company adds.

In addition, the company says, SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010 will let smartphone users browse document libraries on an enterprise's SharePoint server, open files for viewing or editing, and save them back to the server if desired. It's said the software can also automatically sync documents -- when a file is modified on the server, a copy on the smartphone will be updated without user intervention.

Microsoft says PowerPoint Mobile 2010 now allows a Bluetooth-equipped smartphone to be used as a presentation aid. When a PC and smartphone are connected, the PC's screen will display PowerPoint slides, while the phone displays any associated notes, according to the company. The phone can even be used to advance slides.

Outlook Mobile 2010 -- also promised but apparently not part of this week's beta -- will provide online access to corporate email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and other information from a smartphone. It will also include a Conversation View, which allows combining related messages and then moving, categorizing, or deleting them "in just a few clicks," Microsoft says.

The free Office Mobile 2010 beta requires Windows Mobile 6.5 devices -- we didn't see any word about whether they must be touchscreen-equipped, though this seems likely -- and Microsoft's Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Downloading the application from the Marketplace (below left) will automatically install the software onto a phone (below right). 

 

For further information about Microsoft's Office Mobile 2010, see the company's website, here. 

After a long silence on my blog, I've great news :

    Microsoft's beta My Phone service for Windows Mobile now free to all http://myphone.microsoft.com/  And for more info about My Phone, please refer to my previous blog entry Microsoft launches new mobile phone stack

Have fun

In a keynote at this week's Mobile World Congress, CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled an interim upgrade to Microsoft's mobile phone stack. To ship during the latter half of the year, Windows Mobile 6.5 brings support for two online services, including an app store and a data sync/backup service.

In the announcement, Microsoft emphasized that the new 6.5 stack uses the same tools, and has the same API (application programming interface), facilitating forward compatibility. Additionally, the tools used to develop apps for Windows Mobile 6.5 are the same as those used to write PC apps, Microsoft said, citing Visual Studio, .Net, and SQL.

Microsoft's two new services, unsurprisingly, include:

• "My Phone," a Web-based sync service for text messages, photos, video, and contacts
  • Password-protected web interface
  • Facilitates upgrading phones without data loss
  • "Automatic" syncing and backup
  • Currently available in a limited invitation-only beta
• Windows Marketplace for Mobile
  • Search, browse, and buy apps and widgets, from a PC (Windows Live ID required)
  • Direct-to-phone installations
  • Applications qualified by "simple" security and compatibility check from Microsoft

Additional touted new features in Windows Mobile 6.5 include:

• New home screen "dashboard" showing new e-mails, texts, missed calls, and calendar appointments
• More finger-friendly touch-screen interface
• Updated Internet Explorer Mobile browser

First Windows Mobile 6.5 phones

Participating in the launch were Microsoft phone partners HTC and LG. Both pre-announced specific phone models slated to ship with the 6.5 upgrade in the second half of the year:

• LG said its LG-GM7300 -- available first on Windows Mobile 6.1 -- will gain a 6.5 option
• HTC flagged its Touch Diamond 2 and Touch Pro 2 as its first Windows Mobile 6.5 models

 

Slated for WM 6.5, in version "2" releases next year
(HTC Diamond Touch, Touch Pro. Click either for details)

Additional news may be about available on Microsoft's MWC partner list [.doc format], the company said.

Other announcements

Besides the big news related to Windows Mobile 6.5 and its associated services, Microsoft announced several other items. It touted a voice search technology called Recite, for Windows Mobile 6.0 or better. Currently available as a free preview, here, the technology lets users search for spoken notes and reminders using just their voice, Microsoft said.

Additionally, Microsoft announced a long list of new mobile advertising partners, including:

• Mobistar (Orange Group) and BASE, the second and the third largest mobile operators in Belgium respectively
• Mobile travel site WAYN
• eFinancialNews and Private Equity News, part of Dow Jones
• Le Parisien.fr, the mobile site of Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France, described as the "first" daily newspaper in France
• La Vanguardia, a Spanish daily newspaper
• Spanish sports newspaper El Mundo Deportivo
• Le Post.fr, an interactive French mobile site

Microsoft said it offers advertising services in a dozen countries, delivering mobile ads on both Microsoft and partner properties.

Finally, Microsoft partners also announced mobile broadband connectivity for Windows 7, Microsoft's netbook-friendly OS, currently beta-testing. Such partners reportedly included Acer, Asus, Birdstep Technology, Dell, Ericsson, HP, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Huawei Communications Technologies, Option, Qualcomm, Sierra Wireless, Smith Micro, T-Mobile International, and ZTE.

In a statement, Ballmer commented, "Windows phones bring together the best of the Web, the PC, and the phone.”

 Microsoft announced the general availability of the latest addition to the BizTalk Server RFID platform - BizTalk RFID Mobile, an RFID platform for mobile devices based on Windows CE and Windows Mobile. BizTalk RFID Mobile consists of a runtime engine as well as tools and components to develop, deploy, and manage RFID solutions on mobile devices.

Developers, independent software vendors and systems integrators can build device-agnostic mobile applications utilizing RFID and sensor data on devices running Windows CE or Windows Mobile 5.0, 6.0, and 6.1. Events and data can be stored on the mobile device using a SQL sink service, and then communicated to the BizTalk Server RFID platform for further analysis. Mobile devices can be discovered, queried, and managed from the BizTalk Server RFID platform. Support for industry-ratified standards like the Low-level Reader Protocol (LLRP) and the Tag Data Translation (TDT) library provides a standards-based approach to discover, provision and troubleshoot RFID devices, in addition to surfacing business-relevant attributes from RFID tags

For more information on the product, capabilities, and evaluation versions, browse to: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/rfid-mobile.aspx.

The documentation on how to build applications using the BizTalk RFID API can be found at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351599.aspx.

 

Here’s a great article on how to use Windows Media Center with Windows Mobile to do some really cool stuff.

You end up with being able to sync recorded items off your Windows Media Center and watch them on your Windows Mobile phone!

Jeff Kirvin came across two images that France Smartphone posted.

Looks interesting (unofficial post) – check it out.

 

Do you have questions regarding Windows Mobile application development that you need answers to?

Spend an hour with Microsoft employees and MVPs who are experts in Windows Mobile application development.

Join us for a live chat and bring on the questions!

This chat will cover your questions about the tools and technologies used to develop both native and managed applications using the Windows Mobile operating system.

Find our Events on the MSDN Chat calendar here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx

Nowadays, we all hear the term “Cloud Computing”, its benefits and some baby-steps* applications going on. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are the main promoters on this game. On my side, I like Google’s services like GMail, GDocs, Agenda etc… and on Amazon’s side EC2 seems extremely cool and powerful.  

But on the other hand two hotshots defined Could Computing as stupidity and just a business fashion. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

He said: "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign,"  

A big anti-Cloud Computing definition also came from Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, as “it is just an industry fashion.” 

They think that the personal data should definitely stay personal and advice to computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party. The growing number of people storing information on internet-accessible servers rather than on their own machines, has become a core part of the rise of Web 2.0 applications. Millions of people now upload personal data such as emails, photographs and, increasingly, their work, to sites owned by companies such as Google. 

So what are your ideas about cloud computing on relying to a third party perspective?   

* For sure the Cloud Computing applications on the market are really great but compare them to the near feature opportunities on Cloud Computing. These are relatively tiny-baby-steps.

 

Published by Microsoft: http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/B/D/3BDDC5D5-E8CF-4031-A12A-B072ECA27C42/VS2008PETopTenFSEMEA.doc

W3C announced new standards that will make it easier for people to browse the Web on mobile devices. Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0, published as a W3C Recommendation, condenses the experience of many mobile Web stakeholders into practical advice on creating mobile-friendly content.

You may want to look.

Microsoft has published a marketing site for Windows Mobile 6.1, and I'm glad they used Silverlight to create it.

Check it out:

    Windows Mobile 6.1 – New Windows Mobile Software for Pocket PC and Smartphone

    * imageInstant messaging-like texting
    * Improved Internet browsing
    * Simpler e-mail and Bluetooth setup
    * New Home screen interface
    * New Getting Started Center
    * Security enhancements
    * Easier Wi-Fi connection
    * More personal choice

Source: DevHawk - Morning Coffee 160

OpenXML artık bir ISO standardı . 87 Üye Ülkenin katılımıyla gerçekleşen standartlaşma süreci bugün itibarıyla nihayete erdi ve Open XML açık dosya saklama standardı olarak ISO tarafından onaylandı. Open XML 87 Ülkenin %86'sı gibi büyük bir çoğunluğunun desteğini aldı.

ECMA'nın konuyla ilgili açıklamasına http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/ISO_and_IEC_approve_Office_Open_XML.htm linkinden erişebilirsiniz.

Microsoft'un basın duyurusuysa http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/apr08/04-01OpenXMLVotePR.mspx linkinde yer almakta.

While Microsoft's Flash competitor Silverlight is still not available for Windows Mobile (except Microsoft internal Betas), Nokia today announced plans to make Microsoft Silverlight available for S60 on Symbian OS smartphones as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets. Adding support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way.
Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications.

Silverlight is already powering thousands of applications around the world and organizations including Entertainment Tonight, the NBA and NBC Universal to deliver superior Web-based experiences to their customers. The arrangement with Nokia will substantially extend the reach of Silverlight by making the platform available for hundreds of millions of devices, including S60 on Symbian smartphones from a range of manufacturers, as well as Nokia Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.

Microsoft will demonstrate Silverlight on S60 during the opening keyote at Microsoft's MIX08 conference on March 5 in Las Vegas. Silverlight is intended to be available to S60 developers later this year with initial service delivery anticipated shortly thereafter for all S60 licensees. This will allow S60 application developers to use an even wider range of development environments for S60 on Symbian OS than today. Today S60 developers can use: C++ (using native Symbian OS APIs and Open C providing subset of standard POSIX libraries), S60 Web Run-time (supporting standards-based web technologies such as Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and HTML), the Java language, Flash Lite from Adobe, and Python.

Microsoft Silverlight availability for Nokia Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets will be confirmed later. When will Microsoft announce Silverlight's Windows Mobile availability?

Microsoft will soon release version 2.5 of its .NET Micro Framework platform for low-end embedded processors. The new release adds support for networking via a native TCP/IP stack, and for Web Services on Devices (WSD), according to postings on the .NET Micro Framework Team's blog.

Microsoft first released .NET Micro Framework (.NET MF) in 2006, aiming it at wireless remote controls, watches, and other cost-sensitive devices with constrained processor and memory resources. The .NET MF grew out of Microsoft's Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) initiative, with embryonic versions variously dubbed .NET Embedded and TinyCLR. According to Microsoft, .NET MF supports low-end embedded processors and doesn't require an MMU (memory management unit). A typical runtime image is only about 300 KB in size, the company says.

.NET MF grew out of Microsoft's work with SPOT Watches

Microsoft released .NET MF version 2.0 in February 2007, and .NET MF 2.0, Service Pack 1 in September. However, these releases still did not include a native TCP/IP stack, which was listed as "coming soon." Therefore, networking a .NET MF device has required calling through to an underlying operating system with sockets support, according to the company.

Version 2.5 of .NET MF will now offer a stack that is available even when running directly on the hardware. Device makers need only provide a driver for the network interface. This will result in a wider selection of network-capable hardware development platforms for developers to choose from, Microsoft says.

The company adds that the new version of .NET MF will also include client and server support for Web Services on Devices, also known as Device Profile for Web Services (DPWS). Already part of Windows Vista and Windows CE 6.0 Release 2, this "enables a USB-like level of plug-and-play for networked devices," in the company's words. DPWS-enabled devices on a network can discover one another, then invoke the functionality each device provides.

Further specifics of .NET MF, version 2.5, were not provided, nor has a release date been announced. However, according to the .NET MF team, the new version should appear in "early 2008."

For further information, see the blog posting, here.

As an MVP I get questions very offen on Windows Mobile newbies. :) I am always curious and keen to answer your questions. You are always welcome, but here is a nice collection of FAQ on Windows Mobile via msdn. 

Questions are: 

What is a Windows Mobile powered device?

What’s the difference between a Windows Mobile Professional and Windows Mobile Classic device?

What are the different versions of Windows Mobile?

How do I develop applications for Windows Mobile powered devices?

What is the .NET Compact Framework?

How do I develop browser-based applications for mobile devices?

What is SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition?

And the link to the article is : http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsmobile/bb264342.aspx

 

I know everyone is looking for details on Windows Mobile 7, here are the first screen captures and a very nice article how the future is going to be like. It seems that this version will be a really big revalution. here is the article. Edit on 22.1.2008 : Turhal Temizer'in de Turkcelestirerek csharpnedir.com a ekledigi makaleye de buradan ulasabilirsiniz.

Via its Internet Sharing application, Windows Mobile allows sharing a phone's internet connection with a laptop via a USB cable or Bluetooth. WiFi is not supported, but that omission has now been corrected via WMWifiRouter, a free application by programmer Jorrit Jongma.

Being able to use WiFi instead of Bluetooth is desirable for those with 3.6 or 7.2 Mbps HSDPA connections, since these outpace the former's 2 Mbit data rate. But, as this FAQon the XDA-Developers Web forum explains, Internet Sharing was not designed to use WiFi and has been able to do so only if users installed a hacked version of the relevant DLL (dynamic link library).

Windows Mobile's Internet Sharing

WMWifiRouter application

The WMWifiRouter application, though only scantily documented on the above website, corrects this problem by allowing an ad hoc WiFi network to be set up between a laptop and the phone supplying the wide area connection. Available for free, it requires Windows Mobile 5 AKU 3 or Windows Mobile 6.

To download WMWifiRouter, visit here. For more information on Windows Mobile's Internet Sharing capability -- termed its "most underutilized/unknown feature" by Microsoft's Enterprise Mobile Solution Specialist Jason Langridge -- see Langridge's blog,here.

Team Foundation Power Tools for VS2008 is out. New in this Release:

• Find in Source Control tool is an addition to the Team Explorer menu that provides the ability to locate files and folders in source control by the item’s status or with a wildcard expression.

• Open a selected folder in Windows Explorer straight from Team Explorer. This feature allows you to jump straight to the mapped folder location from within Source Control Explorer.

• Quick Label feature that allows labels to be easily applied to a given selection of files and folders in the Source Control Explorer.

• Build Notification tool that runs in the Windows task bar notification area monitoring the status of the build definitions you have specified. It can be configured to show notifications when builds are queued, started, or completed for multiple build definitions spanning multiple Team Foundation Servers.

• Additional TFPT.EXE commands for configuring Team Explorer connection settings (tweakui) and for destroying Work Items and Work Items Type Definitions (destroyWI, destroyWITD).

• Updates to the TFS Best Practices Analyzer for use with a Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server deployment.

• The Process Template Editor is updated for use with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server. It also has several improvements, including: the ability to launch standalone w/o a Visual Studio installation, performance improvements, improved discoverability and bug fixes.

• Bug fixes and removal of Power Tools that are now included within Team Foundation Server:

• Annotate and Treedif are now included in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer; however, Annotate remains is still available in the command-line tool (TFPT.EXE).

• TestToolsTask is included in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server as part of Team Foundation Build.

 

from Brian Harry's blog

Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework is a managed programming model for data parallelism, task parallelism, and coordination on parallel hardware unified by a common work scheduler. Parallel Extensions makes it easier for developers to write programs that scale to take advantage of parallel hardware by providing improved performance as the numbers of cores and processors increase without having to deal with many of the complexities of today’s concurrent programming models.

Microsoft Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5 is almost ready and CTP can be downloaded here

The preview version of ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions is released. The Extensions are a new set of tools and controls that will be added onto existing release of ASP.NET with .NET 3.5. This will make possible for web developers to get the latest updates on ASP.NET without having to wait 1-2 years more for the next release of .NET Framework.
It also includes ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3, which you can also download as a separate file here (you do not need to download it if you have ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview installed already).

What’s in the Extensions Release?

ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET MVC provides model-view-controller (MVC) support to the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime, which enables developers to more easily take advantage of this design pattern. Benefits include the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns, as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD).

The ASP.NET MVC Toolkit provides HTML rendering helpers and dynamic data support for MVC.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data
ASP.NET Dynamic Data helps developers build a fully customizable, data-driven app quickly. It provides a rich scaffolding framework that allows rapid data driven development without writing code, yet it is easily extendible using the traditional ASP.NET programming model.

ASP.NET AJAX
New additions to ASP.NET AJAX include support for managing browser history (Back button support).

ADO.NET Entity Framework
ADO.NET Entity Framework is a new modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information. Benefits include easier to understand and easier to maintain application code that is shielded from underlying database schema changes.

ADO.NET Data Services
ADO.NET Data Services provide new services that find, manipulate and deliver data over the web using simple URIs. Benefits include an easy and flexible way to access data over the web, while enabling the separation of presentation and data access code.

Silverlight Controls for ASP.NET
You can integrate the rich behavior of Microsoft Silverlight into your Web application by using two new ASP.NET server controls: a MediaPlayer server control that enables easy integration of media sources such as audio (WMA) and video (WMV) into your Web application, and a Silverlight server control that allows an ASP.NET page to reference both XAML objects and their event handlers.

Want to shape the future of the Windows Mobile developer experience?

Proceed to https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=502 to submit your developer feature requests and vote on others to drive feature importance.

Microsoft announced Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 will be released at the end of this month. From the beta releases (we have beta 2 now) and .NET 3.0 we saw so many improvements on framework and languages.  From now on, we become capable to use Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) like LINQ and we can focus on the domain of the problem space. And we can do Domain Driven Design (DDD) in language level.

 

DDD is still one of the hardest design issues in many languages and development disciplines, but LINQ is a really nice approach to that problem. So languages are evolving into higher level. But what is next step for languages? In .NET environment or any other frameworks it is still very difficult to parallelize applications. Few programmers, seniors can write multi-threaded code and very few of them really enough capable to debug. In somehow, the operation theory is totally different than human brain.     As commonly known our hardware, computers are ready for those programs for couple of years. Dual core, multi-core processors stand in our laptops, PCs for years. As Aaron Coday from Intel mentioned in Istanbul Bilisim Kongresi 2007, “Software should fallow and support hardware”. Thoughts from the development zone are almost the same. Bill Gates announced in MVP Global Summit 2007, “…..take multiple processors and use them in parallel has been a programming challenge going back many, many decades, so now it's important that we actually solve that problem, and make it possible for developers of all types to take advantage of these multi-core devices….”

So, in my opinion; first step of language evaluation will be in multi-core application development and may be the second one multi-computer (computing-grid) . The name of the first step and opportunities on it are ready : Parallel LINQ or PLINQ.