p&p for smart devices: the Mobile Client Software Factory

Note: this entry has moved.

As annouced a while back, patterns & practices is coming with guidance and tooling on how to best author applications for mobile devices (Pocket PCs), initially targetting the Windows Mobile 5.0.

I’m very excited to be part of this project, as it represents a new challenge in terms of a new platform, but where most of the same sound architectural principles that we been applying over the past years working with p&p still apply.

What’s more, as you already know from the latest p&p deliverables, we’ll continue to be very agile and responsive to community feedback. For that very reason, we have already started releasing weekly drops for you to take a look at! Go ahead and subscribe to the workspace, and don’t hessitate to send your comments through the message board. The entire team is listening.

In my next couple posts I’ll talk about a cool feature for the factory that we’ve been working on for the past couple weeks: the Dynamic Resolution Control. In short: author your single application, give your custom controls multiple alternative layouts for the various resolutions (i.e. QVGA horizontal, VGA vertical, VGA Square vertical, etc.), and have the control dynamically re-apply the layout when the user rotates the screen! Stay tunned. The user experience in VS is pretty cool, I think :)