.NET CF for S60 CTP
On Tuesday we reached a key milestone in the development of our product at Red Five Labs. It was the announcement of our first public downloabable release of our .NET CF for S60 implementation which is available in CTP form from the new and improved Red Five Labs site**. Basically it means you can now go and download our software and try your .NET CF Smartphone applications and see how they would run on Symbian. (The OS that powers amongst others Nokia and Sony Ericsson smartphones)
You can read the announcement and press release here and here respectively. If you're a developer and just interested in the good bits the download link is available here :)
Just a little background on this CTP release. We have received a lot of feedback from parties interested in previewing the technology and while we could accomodate some on our Early Access Program it was still only available to a limited number of people. In order to give more people a chance to preview .NET applications running on Symbian we've decided to release a public build in the form of a Community Technology Preview.
While this preview release gives developers a chance to try .NET applications on Symbian it also gives us a valuable avenue to obtain feedback we can use to shape the product to better meet the needs of our market.
Something to keep in mind when evaluating the CTP is that while these builds do go through some levels of testing they should not be seen as an indication of the quality of the final release. We are still working on outstanding features and we are aware that there might be some some niggling issues present in this build. These known issues and other feedback obtained through our support forums will receive very high priority and will be addressed in future releases. Depending on the release schedule and feedback received we might release another interim iteration or two similar to this one before release.
Deciding whether to hold back on a release until all known issues were resolved or shipping a build to developers interested in working with our .NET implementation today we hoped that by shipping early we'll receive timely feedback on all the strange and wonderful scenarios people will dream up to put the software through that we haven't thought of and we'll have sufficient time to address and adapt to cater for these issues and scenarios before RTM.
That said we hope you'll download the CTP and you'll enjoy kicking the tyres a bit with your own .NET CF Smartphone applications and let us have any comments and suggestions you might have.
The download is available from here. For feedback and support please make use of our support forums. The feedback from these forums comes directly to us and we read it all and will try and respond to all posts where applicable.
Our CTO and Chief Runtime Architect Mike Welham's blog has also moved to our new site and can now be accessed over here. (CRA is a made up job title but he's basically the person responsible for .NET on Symbian today)
If you're interested in general news and announcements about future releases you can subscribe to our news and announcements feed which is available here.
Enjoy.
** Keen eyes will spot the new site is running a customized version of Community Server with skin done by Jaxon.