I've been a tester on the shell team in the Mobile Devices group for the last 3 years or so and I've just recently transitioned to the development team for a change of pace. During my time in test I worked on a bunch of cool features including input improvements (ex. auto-suggest and auto-correct), low memory handling, softkeys, hardware navigation, digital rights management (DRM) and a whole lot more. I was also pretty active in creating tools for verifying our UI consistency between rolling builds and helping to build a UI automation framework using C# for our other testers.

Now as I developer on the shell team I get the pleasure of working on some of the same areas I used to test, plus a few areas that are new to me. Over the next while I'll try to share some tidbits of information and insight for some of these areas including softkeys and low memory handling.

Cheers,
Patrick Derks
Windows Mobile Shell API