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-kevin

Old Versus New Media

On the bus commute from Boulder to Denver today, I was sitting comfortably in a row to myself until we hit the last stop before rolling out of town. Typically, a bunch of folks get on at this stop and today was no exception.

A man in his early 40’s sat next to me and was carrying some magazines… he opened up MacWorld and started flipping through the pages passing one ad after another. I saw him land on a couple of articles that grabbed his attention during the 45 minute ride. Contrast that to my experience. I was able to read through over 40 articles on my phone using NewsGator Mobile… one article grabbed my attention, so I clipped that for revisiting later.

So I either get to read a couple of magazine articles or scan through 40+ articles using NewsGator Mobile… and the following day NewsGator Mobile is going to serve up new and relevant content for me. That ratty old magazine will be worthless. What makes more sense?

Okay, that may not be entirely fair… I must admit there are occasions where a magazine does come in handy, but most of the time NG Mobile is where it is at!

Mobile Platform Breakdown

Anders Lindh recently posted on the platform breakdown in the mobile space… Java dominates, but I think the number may be misleading. Every midlet I have installed on my phone has had problems. Google mobile maps came close, but to get it to work proper the following was needed:

"The problem with satellite images is because of the Java Midlet manager installed by default with Windows Mobile 5. It does not support displaying JPEGs, although WM5 itself does. I installed IBM's J9 virtual machine and then installed Google Mobile Maps, and the satellite view works. AFAIK, you don't need to pay for IBM J9."

Yeh, right - I am a developer and was reluctant to do this. My wife would stop immediately. I think the Java number is misleading…

Flash Lite looks promising, is gaining good traction in Japan and Asia, and is a technology I need to learn more about. The only aspect that seems troubling is the fact that the platform is at a higher level of abstraction than Java. More abstraction usually means less capabilities and J2ME is very limited, so where does that put Flash Lite? I will definitely be keeping an eye on Flash Lite and its evolution.

For me, the most interesting point in the post is the comment next to the Windows Mobile number. The comment states that Windows Mobile “...has the developer community”. That says a ton and is probably the most significant indicator of future success!

Technology Leaders

After finishing graduate school, I was fortunate to be able to work for a great technology leader. David Cohen was the founder and VP of Engineering for a startup in Boulder, CO and, although I didn’t realize it at the time, I now realize I learned a ton from him. David had great vision about technology as it applied to the company’s product as well as technology in general. You gotta know where you are going and how you are going to get there.

Greg Reinacker, founder and CTO of NewsGator, exhibits the same great technology leadership skills as David. Both David and Greg have an exceptional ability to simplify complex problems and do it very quickly. The ability to absorb, analyze, and resolve complex problems with simple and elegant solutions is a common trait among great technology leaders… fortunately, during the period after working for David and before working for NewsGator, I was able to see the opposite approach where something simple is blown out of proportion and made overly complex and ultimately unsuccessful. You gotta see the bad to recognize the good.

A great leader also needs to inspire - and it is very inspiring when that leader puts forth his vision and on top of that makes it public. That is cool; I am sure if blogging existed while I was working for Cohen, he would have been doing the same thing.

More on .NET CF and Symbian

It looks like the team at Red Five Labs is serious about its .NET CF runtime w/ Symbian class libraries. This would be very intriguing, and I am eager to take a look at their beta. One of the developers, Kevin Trethewey, has some screen shots and the team is actively blogging which is a good thing.

Windows Mobile

Daniel Moth has some very interesting insight into Windows Mobile’s current & future role in the consumer market… I especially like this statement, “Ask not how many devices are out there, ask how many of them are running an app that did not ship with the device”.

Finally, from the Moth’s blog, here is something to keep an eye on - .NET compact framework apps running on Symbian devices. This sounds like a very challenging undertaking – I would love to see this be a success.

-kevin

LINQ

Tonight Joe Mayo presented LINQ (query facilities that are being added to the .NET framework) to my .NET User Group… very cool stuff. Having query and set operations treated as first class citizens is very compelling. I was definitely intrigued with the use of Lambda expressions (anonymous methods) and anonymous types – both very powerful concepts and worth digging into.

I gotta be honest though… I am not convinced that the extra time needed to learn the ins and outs of these new classes is worth it. I suspect most development shops already have data abstraction layers that accomplish the same thing. If you are designing a new system, definitely look at LINQ, but don’t kill cycles refactoring just to support LINQ.

-kevin

Under Pressure

… memory pressure that is. Developing mobile applications presents a lot of challenges for developers. The .NET Compact Framework eases the task, but at the end of the day mobile devices have limited capabilities – small displays, constrained user interfaces and controls, intermittent and slower networks, minimal storage, and my favorite - small memory foot prints. Now, I could lie and say that is what makes mobile development fun – most of the time that is true, but sometimes it just gives me a headache ;)

Lately, I have been grappling with memory constraints. Any time you have to minimize memory, you jeopardize performance. This is the dance I have been doing lately with NewsGator Mobile for Windows. Fortunately, the dance is starting to look good, and I am psyched to get this new and improved version out to my users… stay tuned for that!

-kevin

Solid Meeting

We had a really good .Net User Group meeting this evening…

Brian Agnes, my companion from NewsGator, showed off some really cool code generation wares. His demo created C# class files (objects) from a SQL database using mostly XSL transformations (XML to code). Very cool!

Joe Shirey talked about XML data types. I sort of dismissed this concept until I saw Joe’s demos. There is significant value add using the XML data type in SQL… imagine a SOA application that takes data in from various disparate sources coming in as XML. That data could just be injected right into an XML database field. That data can then be queried using XPath or persisted for later massaging. Or another example… you could have a scenario where your application allows the customer to customize the data fields she is capturing. Using a XML data type you can just drop that data into the database w/o needing to modify and deploy a new schema. Cool!

Finally, Nick Van Matre talked about SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). Again, something I haven’t spent much time investigating. I had fumbled around with DTS in the past and this is much improved. If there are situation where you have various data source that you are trying to consume and aggregate, and transform, definitely take a look. Nick gave a great presentation and could moonlight as a comedian – very informative and funny too boot.

We also had plenty of pizza thanks to MicroStaff and lots of door prizes to hand out (around 2K worth) and Michael Main for getting the room. It was a good evening.

-kevin