The Journey of the Lunch Launcher: Part 1 - The origins of the 'lunch launcher'?
Several years ago, when I first joined the .NET Compact Framework team, we took some time (a week, if memory serves) to play with our product. We called that our "app building" time. At it's heart, app building is an opportunity for us to get a feel for the experience our customers will have with our product. Whenever app building time is scheduled, I'm like a kid in a candy store. :)
During that first app building week, many of us got together to brainstorm cool applications. One of these we called the "lunch launcher". In a nutshell, the lunch launcher would be a social application that allowed friends to invite each other to lunch at a specific time and collect votes for the desired restaurant. Shortly before the scheduled time to eat, a notification would be sent to everyone with the selected restaurant.
Unfortunately, the lunch launcher was an application whose time had not yet come. It was not technically feasible to write a networked application that communicated point-to-point with other devices to schedule lunch, so we shelved the idea.
Shelved, that is, until we started planning .NET Compact Framework version 3.5... enter the Windows Communication Foundation.
About two years ago, Roman Batoukov wrote a post titled "Windows Communication Foundation (Compact Edition) and the story of the Lunch Launcher". As Roman (and later, Mark Prentice) described, version 3.5 adds a subset of the Windows Communication Foundation that was released as part of version 3.0 of the .NET Framework. While planning the Windows Communication Foundation subset, an epiphany occurred. Why not implement a Windows Communication Foundation channel that uses email as the transport? Using email for communications would provide a number of big benefits, most specifically a means for addressing the device, regardless of which network it is currently on, and a way to store messages for later transmission if the device is offline at the time of the send.
As a member of the Windows Communication Foundation feature team, I started thinking about the lunch launcher again. When we were preparing for MEDC 2007, I had the privilege of writing and debuting the concept in front of more than 400 attendees and talking about it one-on-one with many throughout conference. The lunch launcher was finally alive!
For the remainder of this series, I will be talking about my journey of writing the lunch launcher (one that I am still embarked on). I will start with the original MEDC 2007 demo application and go through the evolution of the application wanted to write when we first dreamt of the lunch launcher. I hope you will find my tale interesting and informative.
Take care!
-- DK
Disclaimer(s):
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
The information contained within this post is in relation to beta software. Any and all details are subject to change.
Comments
Anonymous
September 07, 2007
PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2007/09/07/the-journey-of-the-lunch-launcher-part-1-the-origins-of-the-lunch-launcher/Anonymous
September 10, 2007
In part 1 , I introduced the lunch launcher. Today, I'm going to talk a bit about the preparations forAnonymous
September 10, 2007
In part 1 , I introduced the lunch launcher. Today, I'm going to talk a bit about the preparationsAnonymous
September 28, 2007
Part 1 - The origins of the 'lunch launcher' Part 2 - MEDC 2007 Part 3 - Managing the Transport LastAnonymous
September 28, 2007
Part 1 - The origins of the 'lunch launcher' Part 2 - MEDC 2007 Part 3 - Managing the TransportAnonymous
October 17, 2007
Part 1 - The origins of the 'lunch launcher' Part 2 - MEDC 2007 Part 3 - Managing the Transport PartAnonymous
November 12, 2007
Part 1 - The origins of the 'lunch launcher' Part 2 - MEDC 2007 Part 3 - Managing the Transport PartAnonymous
November 12, 2007
Over the past couple of months, I have been serializing my experiences in writing the Lunch LauncherAnonymous
November 12, 2007
Over the past couple of months, I have been serializing my experiences in writing the Lunch LauncherAnonymous
November 12, 2007
Part 1 - The origins of the 'lunch launcher' Part 2 - MEDC 2007 Part 3 - Managing the TransportAnonymous
November 13, 2007
David Kline from the NETCF team just published a an in-depth tour of his personal experience workingAnonymous
November 13, 2007
David Kline from the NETCF team just published a an in-depth tour of his personal experience workingAnonymous
November 14, 2007
来自 .NET Compact Framework 研发团队的 David Kline 将自己开发 Lunch Launcher 示例程序的亲身经历撰写为博客系列文章。深入分析了在 .NET Compact Framework 3.5 中支持的 Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) 邮件传输通道的编程。Anonymous
November 15, 2007
The Journey of the Lunch Launcher and Store and Forward MessagingAnonymous
February 24, 2008
Over the past couple of months, I have been serializing my experiences in writing the Lunch LauncherAnonymous
June 03, 2008
It was a busy time last month for mobility guru Jim Wilson , what with two geekSpeaks in a row, but heAnonymous
April 28, 2009
There is a lot of interesting stuff going on with Windows Mobile right now…unfortunately, I can’t talk