Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Patterns & Practices Mobile Application Blocks First Community Drop available

As I posted before, we’re working on the new Community Release of the Patterns & Practices Mobile Application Blocks, formerly Mobile Client Software Factory. And this week we’ve started to publish early bits on the Codeplex site. In fact, this is our first community drop, and there still much work to do, but it’s a good first look at what we’re working on.

We’ll continue publishing community drops so you can follow the project progress and give us some feedback before we ship. Keep in touch!

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Working on a new Mobile Client Software Factory (VS 2008, .Net CF 3.5, WM 6.x!)

It’s been almost two years since I started working on the Microsoft Patterns & Practices Mobile Client Software Factory, and those application blocks, shipped on July 2006, still being very valuable for the mobile developer. But it’s really hard to install it on Visual Studio 2008, in spite of some nice articles about it, like this great one from Glenn Block, which have some little missing steps I sent to Christoph and he posted here.

Well, soon you’ll be able to install it and without all that pain. It’s time to have a new set of mobile blocks updated and working on VS 2008, Windows Mobile 6.x and .NET CF 3.5. Some of the original MCSF team members (Per, Francis, Rohit, Alex, Kzu and me) with the help of an excellent advisory board, were started working on updating some of the original blocks (Configuration, Data Access, Connection Monitor, Endpoint Catalog, Subscription Manager, Disconnected Agent and Password Authentication) and building some new ones targeting modularity and location awareness. As you can see, the Mobile Composite UI Application Block won’t be updated and it will be removed from the new version, same with OAC which has been already updated by Clarius.

This version will be published on http://mobile.codeplex.com/ and ideally it will be the place for future great mobile development blocks.

We still working on prioritization and full feature set. Your feedback is totally welcome. If you have any suggestion, bug report or comment regarding this new project, please feel free to contact me: jose@mobilepractices.net.

Thanks!