To Dev or not to Dev

On Tuesday, Eben came into the speaker room at Tech-Ed needing someone to take over a talk on Windows Mobile, which was to be presented by Goksin Baskir from Microsoft. Goksin had found out earlier in the morning that his Mother-In-Law has passed away and needed to return to Istanbul. Prompted by Ruari Plint I informed Eben that I am willing to present the session, rather then letting it be cancelled.

Goksin and I spent some time reviewing the presentation covering the new and very exciting feature provided by the Windows Mobile 6.1 Refresh SDK. I am not new to Mobile development, as I completed a few Asset Management Project while working at BTG, and I was truly impressed with the content of the talk. After spending a good 6 hours reviewing the notes, testing the demos and even getting to bed early to do the talk, I had a bit of an anti-climax arriving, all prepped and ready to do my 8:00 am Wednesday morning session, only to be told the session only starts at 9:00 am.

After a short introduction by Eben, I started moving through the various aspects of the presentations, and bar one mishap with my first demonstration, I successfully completed the talk, running inside my MacBook, with Windows XP in Parallels. I am sure this must have been another Microsoft first for many of the delegates attending my talk. I also found out afterwards that about 40 delegates attended the talk.

The talk covered the following topics:

• Device Emulator V2 sporting battery life and cellphone simulation and 25 supported device skins.
• FakeGPS to allow for GPS development without the need for GPS units.
• FakeServer to allow for Server development stack builds without the need of actual servers.
• Cellular Emulator allowing for the development of Text and Call enabled Windows Mobile Applications
• The new namespace stack and it's additional features.
• The new sample set inside the SDK and it's availability.

I was extremely pleased when Willy-Peter pointed out that I had made the Top 20 speakers list and on the last check today I ended up 22nd. I am extremely thankful to Eben and Goksin, with a little push from Ruari for giving me the opportunity to present at Tech-Ed, and also have to thank everyone of the MVP's and community members for their morale support.

Crossposted from Diago.co.za