There has been a ton of interest around our soon to be released enterprise scaleable reference application we call Fabrikam Fine Furniture. I have to apologize for the delay in getting the full application published as it has been a long and lengthy process to make this happen. Just like the real world!

We’re receiving 4-5 emails a day from developers who want the full application posted, its coming folks believe me it is.  The publishing process is complex as we all know, in order to populate the documentation with the links to each of the component technologies we first have to publish the source to the MSDN Library. Once published we get the live URLs and we need to update the docs to point to them. Final edit found some inconsistencies that we had to fix. Some of you astute developers have started to find the bits and pieces as they are being published.   

Eliot our masterful technical editor and the fine folks at LGI who built this app with us worked crazy hours to drive this puppy to closure. I think a steak dinner is appropriate. After all this work we really hope you find this application to be a useful reference on how to build truly mobile pc applications.  

Fabrikam Fine Furniture, a fictional company, uses mobile PC computers for order taking and order delivery. Fabrikam's sales agents are mobile within the store as well as at customer sites, and its delivery agents are almost entirely mobile. Fabrikam therefore relies heavily on mobile PCs—especially Tablet PCs—to:

• Enable sales agents to create orders—including notes, sketches, floor plans, and annotations.
• Enable sales agents and customers to generate orders inside or outside of the Fabrikam store with equal ease.
• Enable sales agents and delivery agents to collect customer signatures.
• Support complete and accurate data mobility by using file synchronization, database replication, and Web services.
• Is power and network aware and makes decisions based on this ambient information.

Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dntablet/html/mpconFFFLandPg.asp

It’s coming soon, real soon. Stan sent the final .chm file and Eliot will push it through remotely from his hotel room in Boston while attending Tech Ed…

We’re contemplating a community project around moving this codebase to Vista what do you think? The story is compelling, a lot of the code can be leveraged and the app will really light up with the new Vista platform capabilities around mobile computing. So, who’s in?

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights! It’s just my personal humble opinion

Stephen Toub from Microsoft recently put together an incredible white paper and sample on the development of the Suduko game that we're shipping with the Ultra Mobile PC touch pack. What a wonderful piece of work, the white paper reads well and covers development for touch based machines or tablets from end to end. His code is superb just a great example every Mobile PC developer should read through and examine… Hope you all have fun with this.

/frank

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights! It’s just my personal humble opinion

Last night I took my new Toshiba M400 with Windows Vista February CTP install and the latest Office 12 bits home with me. Office 12 btw, freaking rocks, talk about seamless integration across the tools wow it is cool. Anyway I digress, I was able to connect to my wireless Lan at home without any problem, I started 012 to see if Outlook over http would work but it didn’t and I am not sure why.  So, I got daring, plugged in my smart card reader, it installed, loaded our VPN software, it worked and connected to the corporate servers and had my email flowing.  This is an incredibly stable build, with the new Tablet features in Vista it’s hard to go back to XP, now that it all seems to just work I am staying put…

/frank

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights! It’s just my personal humble opinion

What a long strange trip it has been watching the Origami unfold into the UltraMobile PC. A new era is upon and the developer community has the opportunity to seize the day and to seize the market.  Think about this, a small form factor touch enabled computer that’s inexpensive, take it with you and go anywhere philosophy – it’s a lifestyle thing. I’ll wager that 12-18 months from now what defines this market are the applications that are tuned to the device. Don’t just port them -- fine tune them.

We’re here to help with a new addition to our dev center around the UMPC  http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobilepc/umpc, there’s plenty more to come too:

• We had our friends at 3Leaf build a UMPC Display Emulator that’s in beta right now, it will allow you to run your applications in a constrained UMPC like UI so you can get a feel for how they work without having a device. Check out the beta here.
• We will release the source code for Sudoku along with a white paper that Steven wrote to accompany his code.  This guy rocks man, incredible code, a great game, a super whitepaper wow, I wish we could clone him J 
• We’ll also be shipping more documents and whitepapers to help you with building cool touch enabled application.

Let us know what your needs are, contact us at UMPCISV@Microsoft.com

While you’re at it check out this recent post on gottabemobile.com from Dennis. Congratulations on the new site Dennis and Rob, great work. Then listen to what Lora has to say on what is new – an I mean listen…

/frank

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights! It’s just my personal humble opinion

Today we kicked off our Mobile Platforms Division Partner Briefing which is a two day intense look at the Tablet and Mobile PC product plans moving forward. I have say it was a lot of fun opening up this event with around 100 companies in attendance. I remember 2 years ago when I first joined Tablet we had a similar set of talks with about 1/3 the amount of attendees. So, not only has the momentum continued it’s growing. I could list all that we’ve talked about but instead there’s a few MVP’s here and blogging about the event. You can see their feedback at

http://www.whatisnew.com/blogs/dailynews/archive/2006/02/01/6602.aspx

http://mobilethink.blogspot.com

http://robbushway.blogspot.com

If others crop up I’ll post them too.

Code Magazine has put together a complete end to end developer reference for building applications tuned for the Tablet PC and Mobile PC applications. Are you mobilizing your applications? With the continued move by customers who want anywhere access to their data and applications mobilizing software applications is taking on a new sense of urgency.  This Focus Issue of Code Magazine is a reference you’ll want to have and it’s free, check out the work Markus and company have done http://www.code-magazine.com/focus/TabletPC/ 

Happy reading (I really like the welcome letter)

While you’re there check out the other Focus Issues at http://www.code-magazine.com/focus/Interests.aspx

/frank

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights! It’s just my personal humble opinion.

The tablet pc development center has recently hit an awesome milestone, we've gone over 10,000 unique visitors per month (actually 11,000) which is simply incredible. In the 14 or so months we’ve been online we’ve seen consistent growth month by month. A lot of this is because of the hard work the team is doing providing the information our developers are asking for.  More importantly I believe it has to do with the growth rate of the Tablet PC in general. We recently hit 800 ISV partners signed up for our partner program at http://www.tabletpcpartners.com, which represents a 300% growth over a 12 month period. Applications tuned for the Tablet are growing at similar levels, check our ISV catalog at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/tabletpc/evaluation/software.mspx or the products listed at tabletpcpost http://www.tabletpcpost.com and the newest entry into the ecosystem the Tablet PC online store at Handango.com http://microsoft.handango.com/tablet ISVs now have several ways to promote and sell their software. We’re working with the Windows marketplace team which will lead to even more exposure for our partners.

If you’re developing for tablet check out our webcast series http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/tabletpc/webcasts/default.aspx and sign up to view the In Depth Ink Data Management talk on Friday 12/16 at 11:00am PST

In Depth - Ink Data Management (Level 300) - Friday, December 16, 2005 11:00 a.m. PT
Do more with the Ink data that you collect on the Tablet PC Platform. This session teaches you all about managing, analyzing, and interacting with the Ink data that your Tablet PC application collects. Learn about concepts relevant to the Ink API such as hit-testing Ink, choosing different types of bounding boxes for different tasks, using Bezier Control Points, using stroke Intersections, and more.  

/frank
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights! It’s just my personal humble opinion.

Gotta smack me upside the head, I can’t get blogging into my veins there’s just too much to do…

How do you people do it so consistently everyday I am so impressed. 

Tablet PC was well represented at the Handango partner summit last week, we presented two technical sessions on tablet development, one keynote session, numerous side talks, sponsored some meals, showed off some devices and had a well rounded set of individuals working the show talking tablet. Me, JK, Fritz and John were in attendance and I want to thank the three of them for some awesome support... 

It was an interesting group of developers who really understand the mobile scenarios, I hope to see a lot of those apps upsized for the Tablet and Laptop PC’s in the near future. What do you think about a Tablet PC Portal on Handango?  I think it would be pretty cool…

/frank

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights! It’s just my personal humble opinion.