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MelSam's Blog

Mel Sampat on Windows Mobile
Meaning of Love

Within Microsoft, I am part of the team that owns the Windows Mobile Developer Experience. My team brings you the Windows Mobile SDK, code samples, power toys, white papers and other resources to write great mobile applications. We were just told this week by higher ups that one of the tenets of our division's mission for the next release cycle is to "increase developer love". That's not surprising knowing how Microsoft has always been a very developer focused company. But what does "developer love" mean specifically for the Windows Mobile team?

Over the course of this week I've had numerous meetings with Program Managers in different teams to understand how they can contribute to loving you better. We've come up with many ideas including building a better SDK, including more code samples, additional test tools and utilities, UI design helpers, more shell controls, clearer logo certification guidelines etc. We will be working on these and many more ideas to improve the developer experience.

Think of my team as your advocate, whose job is to influence other teams within Windows Mobile to do what's right for you - the ISVs or enterprise developers. So I would love to hear what YOU think "developer love" should look like. What can we as a division within Microsoft do to make your experience easier, more productive and more fun? What are your gripes and challenges when writing mobile applications? What do you love or hate about our SDK? Do we expose enough APIs and controls? How about the integration between Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and our SDKs? Share your thoughts. Hearing them will help my team ensure that we haven't overlooked anything in our developer love story.

Posted: Friday, July 14, 2006 4:18 AM by MelSam

Comments

two_wheels said:

One phrase comes to my mind.  "Do Not Break Existing Code."  I understand that backward compatibility cannot be maintained forever, but the opposite of being productive is going back and re-writing a bunch of code that worked fine on older devices but does not work properly on the new ones.  Keeping up with the new devices with their screen sizes, etc is challenging enough without having to worry about things like dropped MFC classes, CEDB/Pocket Access being deprecated, RAPI being blocked by default and no RAPI access to EDB, etc etc.  There may be very good reasons for making those changes, but that doesn't make them any more pleasant for the developer.
# July 14, 2006 7:15 PM

Charles M (UK) said:

Hey Mel,
Great post - I'm glad someone at Microsoft is listening and cares so much for the developer experience. Don't let this go to your head but to be honest, your SDK already rocks. Visual Studio is the best environment a programmer could hope for and I've never had much trouble writing native or managed code. That said, I agree with the things you listed - more controls, better UI design support (for native code), more samples etc...all that would be great. Keep up the great work - and thanks for opening yourself up to criticism. I wish more MS teams would be this candid.
# July 14, 2006 10:15 PM

Richard Jones said:

Please make it so that on a 1 hour train journey, I don't fight deploying to the emulator for 45 mins of the trip :-)
# July 16, 2006 4:49 PM

lbendlin said:

Show your love by giving us hobby developers eVC5 (free) instead of VS2005 (expensive)
# July 19, 2006 10:58 AM

3Peso said:

You have such a beautiful search engine for search.msn.com but it seems to me that you use search engine crap from the last century for the MSDN >:-( Really, using Google gives me often better search results from inside the MSDN then the MSDN does. Is this your way to make developers "love" your technology?
# July 21, 2006 4:46 AM

MelSam said:

3Peso: I agree with you. As far as I know, the MSDN team is aware of the difficulty in searching their content. They're constantly working on improvements but search is not as good as it should be. I share your pain.
# July 21, 2006 1:25 PM

Marvin B said:

While VS2005Pro is an awesome development tool, you've made some awful decisions with WinCE.  The application signing model is so expensive (practically, not the theoretical model you evidently used to make this decision) that you're going to drive the small outfits who made the mobile software market right out of it.  Plus, you've now built in an incentive for developers to leave buggy code out in the wild.  ActiveSync is poorly documented and counterintuitive to use for developing synchronization solutions.  On top of that, it has some glaring feature omissions (2 partnership limit, no wireless synchronization, CEDB dependencies).

It's obvious that the ramifications of many of your 5.0 changes were not thought through, and if you did you sure didn't take any steps to resolve these problems or outline work-arounds.  Congratulations, I bet you made it under the deadline though.
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