Vassili Philippov (vasja@spbteam.com), September 04, 2003.
Interview with Chris Forsberg (hereinafter CF), a new member of the Pocket PC Developer Network Team. Chris is one of the most professional .NET CF developers, who wrote several articles for MSDN and recognized as Microsoft MVP in Mobile Devices. The interview is taken by Vassili Philippov (hereinafter VP).
VP: What is being a member of the Pocket PC Developer Network team for you? Why do you spend your time writing articles, finding answers on difficult questions, etc
CF: I have a strong passion for development, smart device development, and more specifically for smart device development with the .NET CF (Compact Framework). As I'm a developer myself and spend much of my daytime (and some night time) in the Visual Studio .NET IDE I continuously struggle with small problems for too much time (as it feels). I often get help from other developers who already found the solution to my problems, and therefore it feels natural for me to share my findings with the community as well.
VP: Chris, I am sorry for this provocative question but it is a really important question for many Pocket PC developers and it seems that no one wants to take responsibility to give an answer. In what situations would you recommend to use .NET CF, in what situations eVB and in what situations eVC++?
CF: No problem! This is really a broad subject, but to take some part of the responsibility I would say that there is already a market for .NET CF applications. For mission critical code (e.g. games) and where you definitely need low level control of the user environment (i.e. mostly commercial end user products) eVC++ will be the choice in most cases. However, if you build business applications for a controlled group of users (you control their devices) I think you should go for .NET CF already today because of the higher level of development efficiency that can be achieved. So, many scenarios that were well suited for eVB before can now be solved in a better way with a .NET CF application. A more extensive answer would probably be to recommend a white paper I recently co-authored on MSDN named Moving from eMbedded Visual Basic to Visual Basic .NET (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnppc2k3/html/fromemb.asp).
VP: You are a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Mobile Devices. What is being an MS-MVP for you?
CF: As I mentioned before the time I spent with smart devices, development, and .NET CF, gets me knowledge that I want to share with the community. Sharing is a wonderful thing as it makes you feel very good! And the power that the community as a whole holds is very impressing, and therefore I truly consider it an honor as MVP to be at the core of the community.
VP: Pocket PC Developer Network is a live dynamic system and it is obvious you will add new ideas, new visions. What do you like in Pocket PC Developer Network? What are your ideas to improve it?
CF: I will focus very much on the new tools like Visual Studio .NET SDP Smart Device Programmability and the .NET CF as I think that this is where many professional developers are going now. In that respect I think that Pocket PC Developer Network can improve and examples of my contributions will probably be news for Pocket PC .NET developers and a more complete list of existing articles and libraries/controls. I will also probably write a few developer articles and Q&As myself, as I love exploring new features of the platform, the Microsoft tools, and even the increasing number of third-party tools.
VP: Chris, you appear to be one of the lucky guys whose business is also their hobby. Could you tell us about your business?
CF: Me and Andy Sjostrom (also contributing editor at www.pocketpcthoughts.com and www.smartphonethoughts.com) run a site at www.businessanyplace.net where we focus on providing professional developers with support in the form of a book, articles, loads of sample code, online demos, and some commercial products. We want to help companies realize the potential in mobile solutions by showing that they shouldn't build a mobile solution for the hype but for the pure business value generated by the solution. Right now we are working on an architectural blueprint for developing enterprise Pocket PC applications with .NET CF. This product will help development teams get started with a solid architecture and loads of sample code.
VP: Do you remember what your first Pocket PC was? And what about the first Windows CE development tool you used?
CF: My first Windows CE (2.01) device was the Casio Cassiopeia E-11 and it still sits on my desk, and I built my first mobile application with the extension available for Visual C++ (the support for Visual Basic came later). But my first Pocket PC was a classic Compaq iPAQ 3630 that I simply adored somewhere in the beginning of summer 2000, and that year I started to develop SOAP-based (the term "Web Services" wasn't invented back then) application with eMbedded Visual Basic.