I got up really early in the morning, so early in fact that I had to sit and wait for Starbucks to open at 7:00am. Then I showed up and hung out with everyone. I spent most of the morning talking to the other staff members – speakers and volunteers. Everyone seems pretty excited and ready to learn something. I hope the people looking to learn don’t come to my session! 
After a few announcements from Doug Turnure (including interactive book giveaways), Todd Fine – Regional Director Extraordinaire gave the keynote presentation. For those of you who don’t know what a regional director is, Todd explained that an RD is essentially an unpaid extension of the Microsoft marketing department. Send Todd all your MS related questions and he’ll get you answers.
I was the room proctor for the Mobile track, so I got to watch all the mobile topics, which was totally cool because I’m interested in the mobile lifestyle. So interested that I co-founded the Atlanta Mobility User Group with Paul Lockwood. Brendon Schwartz and I gave the very first presentation on Mobile ASP.Net applications. Brendon covered the current version of the .Net Framework and ASP.Net while took a look ahead at ASP.Net 2.0. Brendon and I tag-teamed on questions throughout the entire presentation of slides and demo code. I won’t write much about my own presentation – download the slideshow and code if you’re interested.
Rob Zelt gave the second presentation – programming Ink-enabled applications for the Tablet PC. What was really impressive was the ability to add Ink functionality to a form with only two lines of code and a Using statement. Suddenly he was drawing with his pen on the form. Add a button and call the Ink.Strokes.ToString function and Presto – the Ink he’d scrawled on the form was translated into text on a label. Rob had this great demo showing off the built in functionalities of the Ink SDK – he had a map you could draw on and save information about the strokes to a SQL Server database. We talked a lot about maps – the ability of Ink to recognize changes in directions in a line. So, for example, draw directions on a map and hit the MapPoint webservice to get road names and nearby points of interest. Check out the www.tabletpcdeveloper.com MSDN site for some great documentation and code samples.
Don Hinds gave the third presentation – mobile device configuration management and enforcement. The difference between management and enforcement is setting up a configuration (management) and not letting the users change the configuration (enforcement). According to Don, when it comes to device configuration, there is no substitute for testing on the actual devices. Device configuration is controlled through an XML file that is delivered either via a C++ API call, a .Net namespace, or an external tool running over ActiveSync. Configuration gets complicated b/c different devices have different supported configuration values. Configuration gets even more complicated b/c you have to have signed, certified code to run on different networks (TMobile, Verizon, etc). Once you have the configurations you want loaded into the system, there is a namespace that handles monitoring the system for configuration changes (Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Status)
Bill Ryan gave the fourth presentation – Speech server SDK. His presentation was actually going to be on a different topic, but his external USB hard drive died this morning so he used something else that he had on his laptop. Bill covered QA components, semantic maps, embedding wav files, and more. The sample application we were working with is a fictional bank’s website complete with call management. He was able to demonstrate building conversations, complete with custom recorded prompts and responses.
Glen Gordon gave the fifth presentation – .Net Compact Framework 2.0. Windows Mobile 5 and the .Net Framework Beta 2 have both recently been released, so this was an exciting look ahead. There is also a new version of the SQL Server CE (now called SQL Server Mobile Edition). The Compact Framework 2.0 is a superset of the CF 1.0. A lot of enhancements – improved string building, XML handling is much improved (including XPath queries and XMLReaders), and ADO.Net is much easier with the new version of SQL Server Mobile Edition. CF 2.0 also includes keyboard support, programmatic access to the clipboard, and some new methods and properties. Screen rotation is now a feature of Windows Mobile 2003 Second edition and the CF 2.0 gives programmatic access to the orientation changes. One of the nicest enhancements for the SmartPhone edition is the InputMethodEntry properties on textboxes – specifying that a textbox only accepts numbers or letters (to speed input). Glen showed us some really slick demos of the new components and namespaces, including the web browser control and the XML handling and XPath.
Glen Gordon wins the quote of the day – “I’m rarely wrong, and when I am it’s usually a small thing”
— Matt Ranlett
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