I had a dream too
Very shortly after joining patterns & practices to work on the then "Smart Client Program", I started to get a huge amount of requests for guidance on Mobile scenarios.
Back at that time, the OpenNETCF guys had published a number of our blocks which were ported into the Compact Framework and I knew about several other successful attempts by many of our members.
I developed many apps on the mobile platform many years ago: the old HP WinCE machines, Psion machines, etc. I longed for those hours dealing with the emulators, cross-compilers, getting the most of the last byte of memory, etc.
We immediately put together a proposal for developing an offering, but for one reason or another other things got higher priority.
But persistance is rewarding. Almost 2 years later we started the project. The project was officially approved around March 2006 and about 6 months later the first p&p deliverable targeting mobile devices was shipped: the Mobile Client Software Factory, following the same content strategy we pioneered with the Smart Client Software Factory.
The release includes a number of great components that will hopefully make the development experience of mobile apps easier: a great set of application blocks, a reference implementation, guidance packages for automation, docs, hands-on-labs, etc.
Among the coolest components is the "Orientation Aware Control", that allows developers to design apps targeting multiple screen resolutions and orientations.
Daniel Cazzulino, our VS.NET and XML wizard in our team, has a great article here about it: http://clariusconsulting.net/blogs/kzu/archive/2006/07/05/ZeroCodeAdaptiveUIs.aspx
And talking about teams, I’d like to thank our colleagues at the Mobile & Embedded Devices group: John Dietz, Eric Engineer and Loke Uei Tan and our Danish colleagues from the Microsoft Dynamics team: Erik Dibbern Röser, Ricky Kaare Rasmussen, Laurent Lopez and Bjarne Schøn; all of who have tirelessly sponsored the project until its RTW.
Finally, it was a privilege to work with the core team at p&p. A world class team indeed: Per Vonge Nielsen and Edward Jezierski in architecture and program management; Francis Cheung, John Socha-Leialoha, Daniel Cazzulino, Santiago Blason, Jose Salazar in development; Carlos Farre, Mohammad Al-Sabt, Rohit Sharma, Terrence Cyril Joseph Anthuvan, Lavanya Selvaraj, Saravanan Marappan, Ritesh Chaturvedi and Benjamin Chou in QA; Alex Homer, Tina Burden McGrayne, Paul Slater, Claudette Siroky in User Experience and our fearless release manager Sanjeev Garg.
Thanks guys, it was a pleasure to work with you!
