Looking to the future with our mobile support

Recently, there’s been a few developments of note in the mobile space from Microsoft. Let me recap them briefly:

• The Zune hardware has been discontinued. The Zune name lives on as a set of services for mobile music and video.
• Mango (or Windows Phone 7.5) is slowly but surely being downloaded to WP7 phones. Critics are now saying it’s a worthy competitor to Android and iOS.
• Have I mentioned Windows 8 anywhere?
• Even after many promises about providing such support, there is still no support for Windows CE and the ,NET Compact Framework in Visual Studio 2010. It’s even stated as such in MSDN. At this stage, I would even state that such support won’t be provided in VS2011, currently in “Developer Preview” mode.

Er, say what? Yes, as far as we are aware, both by reading links such as the two I gave and by evaluating the subtext, Microsoft don’t want you to continue Windows CE and .NET CF development but would rather you concentrate on Windows Phone apps in Silverlight. If you do want to do such pre-WP7 mobile development, there’s still Visual Studio 2008 and the Windows Mobile 6 SDK, but that’s it.

Consequently, we feel certain that continuing to provide .NET CF support in our Data and XPO libraries is no longer a viable use of our resources, especially given the major changes to the markets we operate in and platforms we support. Quite honestly, we haven’t provided any new functionality for CF for a while and I’m sure that the large majority of our customers don’t even know that it’s there. (I’m the CTO and I was only vaguely aware of its presence.) Nevertheless we expend time and resources in testing it whenever we make changes to our data support. Hence v2011 vol 1.x will be the last version of DXperience that will support data provisioning for CF; v2011 vol 2 will no longer have that support.

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