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MEDC Blog - Day 1 (continued)

  • Artikkeli

What a great day it's been! It started with a Bill Gate's keynote - this is the first one in my five years at Microsoft that I've managed to make it to for various reasons. Bill announced Windows Mobile 5.0 (I bet you didn't see that coming ;-) ) and was joined on stage by some great speakers who ran some sweet ("sweet" was word of the day) demos of the new features in 5.0.

My favourite part was when Bill (I like to imagine it's OK to call him Bill), said the major feature of Windows Mobile 5.0 was the focus on Developers - yes, you guys. More APIs, more classes, more features. You're going to love it. The demo highlights for me were Mike Hall's and Neil Enns' talks - they both built apps right before our eyes. Neil is the fastest, most accurate typist I've ever seen. I'm convinced he has bionic fingers.

Incidentally, I've previously seen Neil's work because he and Mike were both people we signed up for our "sweet" new feature we were announcing today: eHow-tos. What's an eHow-to I pretend to hear you ask? I'm happy to explain. We got a bunch of devs, and asked them to build real applications whilst we captured the screen and filmed them talking and explaining it. Thanks to Adobe Premier, we mixed them all together, and the result is a 10 to 15 minute video program you can watch on-line. We think that actually seeing Visual Studio 2005 Beta being used by a real developer will make things seem a lot easier when you start developing yourself. Anyway, they'll all be online soon so you can see for yourself.

So after all that excitement I took a little walk around Vegas. Boy, as a good catholic boy growing up in Ireland, this is a truly bizarre place. I hurried back to my hotel room and locked the door :-) Later on in the day it was time for us to man our special booth at the MEDC Exhibition hall, and our video and prize-draw soon picked up a great crowd. If you are attending MEDC, stop by our booth (it's in the middle section under the Microsoft banner) and say hi - you could win a great Windows Mobile device. OK, time for me to sign off. Looking forward to attending some classes myself tomorrow on all the amazing new features available in Windows Mobile 5.0.