A couple of weeks ago, the famous Mike Hall asked if I was interested in presenting on Bluetooth at the monthly WE-DIG meeting. After confirming that there would be food at the occassion, I figured that it would be "rude not to" present for this audience.
So, last Wednesday, I arrived for my first WE-DIG meeting.
First, a little background on WE-DIG...
WE-DIG stands for "Windows Embedded Developers Interest Group" and was started by several members of the community to be "dedicated to the exchange of ideas around Microsoft Windows embedded and mobile software development." The group members also take on special projects like developing a Windows CE BSP for the Gumstix embedded board.
If you are interested in learning more about WE-DIG, you can visit their website at: http://www.we-dig.org and drop by their monthly meetings in the Seattle area.
I wasn't sure what to expect from the meeting as it largely involves geeks from major embedded development companies in the greater Seattle area. Having run my own user group during college at UC Berkeley, I was curious to see how the group organized, setup, and ran their meetings. The first part of the meeting was an informal chit-chat session where we introducing ourselves to each other and listened to some particulary bad computing jokes while waiting for the members to trickle in... ah, I just love being a geek!
Once the members got settled, Paul Yao manned the podium and introduced the first speakers of the meeting: members of the .net Compact Framework team. They gave an overview of NETCF and delved into the new features in their latest version, NETCF v2. They showed off some impressive stats on memory and performance improvements for the latest version. It's amazing to see the uptake of managed code on mobile devices relative to the desktop. The NETCF team has done a terrific job in understanding the needs of the mobile market while retaining the essence of managed development. In doing so, they've enabled access for things like Power Management and the Serial Port on mobile devices. What a lot of people may not know is that you can use the NETCF directly from Windows CE as well. In fact, you can download the NETCF v2 update for Platform Builder by following this link: NETCF v2.0 MSDN Download .
Members of the .net Compact Framework team presented on the new features of NETCF v2.
After their presentation, we breaked for dinner [pizza!] and I prepared to present on one of my favorite topics. The great thing about presenting to an audience like that on Wednesday is that you don't need to explain the "basics" like Winsock, managed code, etc. I whizzed through the slide deck pointing out specific areas of advice that I thought would benefit mobile and embedded developers [like Bluetooth security, etc.] At the end, I showed off the Bluetooth managed library by bringing up real code for a Bluetooth enabled chat application on the Pocket PC and Smartphone. The audience was really receptive and asked some great questions [like how to do peer to peer gaming] on Bluetooth.
I'm glad I got to present at WE-DIG not only because I got some free pizza, met with some great folks, and presented on one of my favorite topics. No, those were nothing compared to what the WE-DIG team gave me at the very end: a full-sleeved WE-DIG shirt! Here I was at my first WE-DIG meeting being crowned as "one of them"!!! This was a fantastic experience and I'm looking forward to attending future meetings as well... Who knows, maybe I'll see you there!
I sat next to Mike Hall in the back, watching him bring up a new embedded platform from his spiffy cool notebook.
