Tuesday, April 29, 2003
Mobility Developer Conference 2003, Paris
Posted by Peter Foot in "THOUGHT" @ 11:00 AM
Back at the very beginning of April, Microsoft held the second of its Mobility Developer Conferences for 2003 in Disneyland Paris. I was lucky to be able to attend and find more about Microsoft's entire Mobility strategy, including what is available now and a little of what is coming up in the future. Read on for a summary of what was discussed at the conference.
The Venue - Disneyland Paris
I was lucky to be able to spend a short time in both Disney Studios Park and Disneyland Park prior to the conference. In short, the Disney Studios mainly involve things blowing up around you with huge fireballs. When in the Disneyland Park while waiting to get in the Haunted House the system crashed and had to be restarted – how evil is that… :twisted:
Conference Tools
As is common of most events these days, the conference had an 802.11 wireless network and a conference application for Pocket PC. The Web site was accessible from Smartphone, Pocket PC or Laptop PC. There were also a couple of PCs in the hall but these were locked down to providing feedback only. This was for the simple reason that it was assumed all the attendees would bring laptops. Not owning a laptop myself I had only my Pocket PC for connectivity. When you are away from a proper PC for this amount of time you really begin to notice the limitations of the Pocket PC. Not least of which is the battery life of my antique iPAQ 3630 which could not cope with my few short uses during the breaks to check email and leave feedback on the previous session. Many others sat beeping and tapping away during the talks, which was a bit annoying.
Pre-Conference Day
The Pre-Conference day covered an overview of the whole .NET vision. Because it was for a developer audience the content was stated to be 10% Vision and Marketing and 90% Technical, however, that said it didn’t get particularly heavy going. A large bulk of the pre-conference was a discussion of Web Services. They are such a key part of .NET and of course the Compact Framework is a great platform for consuming Web Services. I found the day very useful. It's all too easy to get closely involved with a particular area and not fully appreciate the bigger picture. The whole pre-conference was general to .NET and did not cover anything mobile specific – "That’s for Tomorrow" we were told.
Day 1
Keynote
The Keynote was of course not as groundbreaking as that at the first MDC 2003 event in New Orleans a couple of weeks earlier. However there were a couple of interesting announcements. The first being that the C# language and the Common Language Infrastructure (both very important parts of .NET) had achieved ISO certification. Microsoft went to great efforts to talk up their interest in pushing open standards - such as XML Web Services.
The second announcement was particularly relevant to Europe as Orange announced its new developer site which aims to support Smartphone developers, although they intend to extend it to other platforms too. This level of support from Orange has been sadly lacking until now, especially with the code-signing features of the Smartphone OS, which meant that it was difficult to get the phone unlocked to develop code for it. Developing and getting your code signed is still a fairly complex process but at least there is now a source of support available for developers for Orange’s SPV. Orange’s slides were very typically high on design and low on content. It was like watching somebody’s holiday slides…
HP showed a demo of its Mobile Printing SDK, where they showed how it was possible to print directly to a Bluetooth connected HP printer from a .NET Compact Framework application.
Choices, Choices…
The rest of the sessions were based on a number of different tracks with some hands-on lab sessions. The tracks available were "Client Development", "Server Applications and Services" and "Wireless Industry" looking into the wider industry issues. I decided to follow mainly the Client Development sessions.
Next Generation Pocket PC and Smartphone Development Platform
The first of these sessions was one I was particularly excited about. Here we got to know a bit about "Ozone", the next version of Pocket PC.
This new version, as already exposed elsewhere recently, will be based on the latest version of the core CE operating system – version 4.2. This offers a number of benefits, particularly reliability and performance - there has been a considerable amount of work on the OS since version 3.0 was created four years ago. A big improvement for developers will be that the .NET Compact Framework will be preinstalled to ROM.
Developing Games with the .NET Compact Framework
This talk described the built-in functionality of .NET which can be used to write games. A number of examples were demonstrated, from a fish tank simulator where the user could purchase fish online and look after their fish to achieve a high score. Microsoft also announced they would be releasing a Whitepaper shortly which would include a number of useful base classes for handling sprites, etc., which you can build on to create games.
Optimization Techniques for Intel XScale
This talk took a noticeably more technical approach and worked through some code using Intel’s VTune application to identify areas of code which were taking the longest time to execute and performing various optimizations on these code blocks.
.NET CF: Data Access Best Practices
This talk concentrated not on the specifics of programmatically accessing your data, but instead focused on the application design and how to provide seamless Online/Offline applications with a responsive user experience. Most handheld applications need to synchronise their data in some way and Craig Neable showed how this was done with an application which had a local cache of data and periodically synchronized the data in the background automatically.
Ask the Experts
The evening gave us the opportunity to speak to the various Microsoft experts about their specific areas dotted around the exhibition hall. Food and drink were provided and were kind of Mexican themed complete with plastic cacti to add to the effect.
Day 2
Compact Framework: Phone Features
This session showed hooking into the Phone API functionality in Pocket PC Phone Edition from .NET code. As with the game development talk, the code presented will be made available shortly with a Whitepaper.
Compact Framework: Interoperability
This session covered calling native code from .NET describing how the basic types are marshalled and the limitations in the Compact Framework. There was also some discussion of using COM objects involving a native wrapper layer. The marshalling engine is much simpler than that used in the desktop .NET Framework so the developer must do more work to deal with complex structures and types.
Building Location Based Applications with Mappoint
Mappoint is a Web service which can be used to query for maps based on location from latitude and longitude or partial address. We were shown an application which was capable of locating the nearest petrol station to a given location and provide driving directions in a wide range of languages. Applications for the service can range from providing point of interest information to tracking fleets and packages.
Device Management and Security
This session concentrated on the XML provisioning services introduced with Smartphone 2002. This allows an operator or enterprise to configure devices over-the-air or via an installer. The Smartphone security model which defines what an application can do based on its level of access was described. It is still up to the operators to decide how to handle this. For example if you get your application signed by the Mobile2Market program you may only get partial permission on the device, to be able to access all aspects of configuration you must be signed by the operator itself, for example, Orange. Obviously this is designed to avoid potentially damaging software bringing down a network.
Connectivity, Networking, Bluetooth, SMS
The final session was looking at the various connectivity APIs available to developers. Describing how Connection Manager determines what network type a target system is on and establishing the appropriate connection. The Bluetooth stack was also discussed. The API to this follows the same design as the Windows XP Bluetooth stack.
Goodie Bag
Apart from tons of ideas and information and some very badly scribbled notes (I wish I could read my own handwriting, I should have probably become a doctor) all conference attendees received a backpack with various goodies. The highlight of these for me was definitely the “Microsoft Mobile Development Toolkit” a two-disc set comprising all the tools necessary to build on the Smartphone and Pocket PC platforms, an Ozone Beta SDK and a number of technical documents covering a range of issues surrounding development, testing and certification and Microsoft’s Mobile2Market initiative.
Summary
There was loads of information conveyed in the few days. By the end of it I was totally exhausted. A lot of the information was based on future functionality (which due to NDA I can't elaborate on) rather than the here-and-now which wasn't always made crystal clear. However having a fair idea of what I wanted to get out of the conference before hand I came away feeling I had learned a great deal.
The Venue - Disneyland Paris
I was lucky to be able to spend a short time in both Disney Studios Park and Disneyland Park prior to the conference. In short, the Disney Studios mainly involve things blowing up around you with huge fireballs. When in the Disneyland Park while waiting to get in the Haunted House the system crashed and had to be restarted – how evil is that… :twisted:
Conference Tools
As is common of most events these days, the conference had an 802.11 wireless network and a conference application for Pocket PC. The Web site was accessible from Smartphone, Pocket PC or Laptop PC. There were also a couple of PCs in the hall but these were locked down to providing feedback only. This was for the simple reason that it was assumed all the attendees would bring laptops. Not owning a laptop myself I had only my Pocket PC for connectivity. When you are away from a proper PC for this amount of time you really begin to notice the limitations of the Pocket PC. Not least of which is the battery life of my antique iPAQ 3630 which could not cope with my few short uses during the breaks to check email and leave feedback on the previous session. Many others sat beeping and tapping away during the talks, which was a bit annoying.
Pre-Conference Day
The Pre-Conference day covered an overview of the whole .NET vision. Because it was for a developer audience the content was stated to be 10% Vision and Marketing and 90% Technical, however, that said it didn’t get particularly heavy going. A large bulk of the pre-conference was a discussion of Web Services. They are such a key part of .NET and of course the Compact Framework is a great platform for consuming Web Services. I found the day very useful. It's all too easy to get closely involved with a particular area and not fully appreciate the bigger picture. The whole pre-conference was general to .NET and did not cover anything mobile specific – "That’s for Tomorrow" we were told.
Day 1
Keynote
The Keynote was of course not as groundbreaking as that at the first MDC 2003 event in New Orleans a couple of weeks earlier. However there were a couple of interesting announcements. The first being that the C# language and the Common Language Infrastructure (both very important parts of .NET) had achieved ISO certification. Microsoft went to great efforts to talk up their interest in pushing open standards - such as XML Web Services.
The second announcement was particularly relevant to Europe as Orange announced its new developer site which aims to support Smartphone developers, although they intend to extend it to other platforms too. This level of support from Orange has been sadly lacking until now, especially with the code-signing features of the Smartphone OS, which meant that it was difficult to get the phone unlocked to develop code for it. Developing and getting your code signed is still a fairly complex process but at least there is now a source of support available for developers for Orange’s SPV. Orange’s slides were very typically high on design and low on content. It was like watching somebody’s holiday slides…
HP showed a demo of its Mobile Printing SDK, where they showed how it was possible to print directly to a Bluetooth connected HP printer from a .NET Compact Framework application.
Choices, Choices…
The rest of the sessions were based on a number of different tracks with some hands-on lab sessions. The tracks available were "Client Development", "Server Applications and Services" and "Wireless Industry" looking into the wider industry issues. I decided to follow mainly the Client Development sessions.
Next Generation Pocket PC and Smartphone Development Platform
The first of these sessions was one I was particularly excited about. Here we got to know a bit about "Ozone", the next version of Pocket PC.
This new version, as already exposed elsewhere recently, will be based on the latest version of the core CE operating system – version 4.2. This offers a number of benefits, particularly reliability and performance - there has been a considerable amount of work on the OS since version 3.0 was created four years ago. A big improvement for developers will be that the .NET Compact Framework will be preinstalled to ROM.
Developing Games with the .NET Compact Framework
This talk described the built-in functionality of .NET which can be used to write games. A number of examples were demonstrated, from a fish tank simulator where the user could purchase fish online and look after their fish to achieve a high score. Microsoft also announced they would be releasing a Whitepaper shortly which would include a number of useful base classes for handling sprites, etc., which you can build on to create games.
Optimization Techniques for Intel XScale
This talk took a noticeably more technical approach and worked through some code using Intel’s VTune application to identify areas of code which were taking the longest time to execute and performing various optimizations on these code blocks.
.NET CF: Data Access Best Practices
This talk concentrated not on the specifics of programmatically accessing your data, but instead focused on the application design and how to provide seamless Online/Offline applications with a responsive user experience. Most handheld applications need to synchronise their data in some way and Craig Neable showed how this was done with an application which had a local cache of data and periodically synchronized the data in the background automatically.
Ask the Experts
The evening gave us the opportunity to speak to the various Microsoft experts about their specific areas dotted around the exhibition hall. Food and drink were provided and were kind of Mexican themed complete with plastic cacti to add to the effect.
Day 2
Compact Framework: Phone Features
This session showed hooking into the Phone API functionality in Pocket PC Phone Edition from .NET code. As with the game development talk, the code presented will be made available shortly with a Whitepaper.
Compact Framework: Interoperability
This session covered calling native code from .NET describing how the basic types are marshalled and the limitations in the Compact Framework. There was also some discussion of using COM objects involving a native wrapper layer. The marshalling engine is much simpler than that used in the desktop .NET Framework so the developer must do more work to deal with complex structures and types.
Building Location Based Applications with Mappoint
Mappoint is a Web service which can be used to query for maps based on location from latitude and longitude or partial address. We were shown an application which was capable of locating the nearest petrol station to a given location and provide driving directions in a wide range of languages. Applications for the service can range from providing point of interest information to tracking fleets and packages.
Device Management and Security
This session concentrated on the XML provisioning services introduced with Smartphone 2002. This allows an operator or enterprise to configure devices over-the-air or via an installer. The Smartphone security model which defines what an application can do based on its level of access was described. It is still up to the operators to decide how to handle this. For example if you get your application signed by the Mobile2Market program you may only get partial permission on the device, to be able to access all aspects of configuration you must be signed by the operator itself, for example, Orange. Obviously this is designed to avoid potentially damaging software bringing down a network.
Connectivity, Networking, Bluetooth, SMS
The final session was looking at the various connectivity APIs available to developers. Describing how Connection Manager determines what network type a target system is on and establishing the appropriate connection. The Bluetooth stack was also discussed. The API to this follows the same design as the Windows XP Bluetooth stack.
Goodie Bag
Apart from tons of ideas and information and some very badly scribbled notes (I wish I could read my own handwriting, I should have probably become a doctor) all conference attendees received a backpack with various goodies. The highlight of these for me was definitely the “Microsoft Mobile Development Toolkit” a two-disc set comprising all the tools necessary to build on the Smartphone and Pocket PC platforms, an Ozone Beta SDK and a number of technical documents covering a range of issues surrounding development, testing and certification and Microsoft’s Mobile2Market initiative.
Summary
There was loads of information conveyed in the few days. By the end of it I was totally exhausted. A lot of the information was based on future functionality (which due to NDA I can't elaborate on) rather than the here-and-now which wasn't always made crystal clear. However having a fair idea of what I wanted to get out of the conference before hand I came away feeling I had learned a great deal.
