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Counting Down to Seven: Charlie Kindel and the Windows Phone 7 Team’s Focus

"Counting Down to Seven" badgeTime for another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

If you’re following what’s happening with Windows Phone 7, you should follow Charlie Kindel – both his blog and Twitter account. Charlie is one of the people behind the new “Phone 7” experience; I don’t think he’s exaggerating in his Twitter bio when he says “The future of application development for Windows Phones is in my hands.”

In his latest blog entry – Focus, Focus, Focus – he writes that the reason that Windows Phone 7 seems atypical of Microsoft is the power of “no”. The Windows Phone team didn’t just decide what they were going to build, they also decided what they were not going to build, and work around the “5P” framework of:

  1. Purpose
  2. Principles
  3. Priorities
  4. Plan
  5. People

Here’s the Windows Phone developer experience team’s stated purpose:

Our purpose is to harness the energy, talent, and attention of developers and designers with a platform and ecosystem that delivers on the developer experience end to end; that, combined with the phone’s end-user experience, results in a winning virtuous cycle.

From that purpose, they derived some principles, among which are:

  • Every decision we make must be made mindful of the effect on end-users. Simply put, the end-user is king. 
  • We will do a few things and do them very, very well; we are better off not having a capability than doing it poorly. There are always future versions.
  • No API will be created or documented without a clear use case; “build it and they will come” APIs almost always do nothing but create bad legacy.
  • We will build on the shoulders of giants; where possible integrate instead of create.
  • We will strive to not show our organizational boundaries to developers.

What’s truly interesting is the list of Windows Phone 7’s targeted developer segments. This is an ordered list, with the highest-priority segment listed first:

  1. Consumer Developer – Pro Devs who build products that are sold directly or given out for free to general public end-users.
  2. Non-Pro Developer – Non-Pro Developers building products for academic/personal use.
  3. In-ROM Developer – Pro Devs who build products & technologies that are sold to mobile operators or device manufacturers.
  4. Enterprise Developer –Pro Devs who build apps & technologies that are sold to corporate clients and businesses.
  5. IT Developer – Pro Devs who build apps & technologies that are only for use by their own corporation.

I have often quipped that sometimes using Microsoft stuff “feels like eating from the dumpsters outside a cubicle farm”; that is, that their software targets enterprise and IT first and small-shop/indie coders like I was last. This list inverts the priorities I image the Windows Mobile team had, and my response to that is “good”.

Charlie makes a point of saying that the prioritization is temporal; over time, the priorities may change and they will serve some of the lower-priority segments, but all the while adhering to the purpose and principles listed above.

Then there’s the plan. The plan is to have Windows Phone 7 ready for the MIX conference, and it looks like that will happen. “Events,” Charlie writes, “are great forcing functions for engineering teams”.

Finally, the people. The Windows Phone 7 team is a diverse bunch coming from all across Microsoft – the Xbox people, developer division geeks as well as members from Windows Live, Exchange, Windows OS, Office and Developer and Platform Evangelism.

Go check out Charlie’s full blog entry, which describes the Windows Phone 7 team’s purpose, principles, priorities, plan and people in greater detail, and check in on him often. If you’re planning on building apps for Windows Phone 7, he’s one of the people to follow.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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For your enjoyment and enlightenment, I present 4 articles featuring lists…

Soma’s Key Software Development Trends

S. Somasegar

S. “Soma” Somasegar, Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division, writes about what he sees as emerging trends in the world of software development.  He says it’s not a comprehensive list of all trends in the world of building software, but trends where Microsoft is doing some serious investing of time, energy and Dark-Side-of-the-Force midichlorians. You’ll have to read the article for a more fully fleshed-out explanation of each trend, which I’ve listed below:

  • Cloud Computing: Or as I like to call it, “Servers as a Service”.
  • The Web as a Platform: Contrary to what you might have heard, The Empire’s pretty big on the web, on both the server side (from Azure to IIS to SharePoint to ASP.NET/ASP.NET MVC) to the client side (HTML, JavaScript/jQuery and Silverlight).
  • Parallel Computing: I can’t tell you the number of things I’ve ruined with threads. I eventually get them right, but wow, can they be a lot of work. .NET 4.0 introduces a number of parallel programming features that make taking advantage of the multicore power in even the cheapest of today’s machines much easier.
  • Proliferation of Devices: “Computer” no longer refers to just the machine on your desktop or in your lap and “user interface” is no longer limited to just “keyboard, mouse and monitor”.
  • Agile Development Process: The upcoming Visual Studio 2010 provides lots of support for agile processes. Hopefully, we’ll see third parties write plug-ins to support even more!
  • Distributed Development: I don’t just talk about geographically-spread work, I live it! I telecommute from the home office, HacklabTO or cafes, and my co-workers in Microsoft Canada’s Technical Evangelism Team pipe in from Mississauga, Ottawa and Calgary.

My first response to the list was “Hey, Soma, where’s mobile?”, but I choose to group it in with “Proliferation of Devices”.

Five Pervasive Myths About Older Software Developers

1960s computer programmers

I’m 42 years old. In most white-collar work, I would be seen as “entering my prime”. In the software world, many employers would advise me to “stop buying green bananas” (think about it for a moment if you don’t get the joke). Age discrimination is an unfortunate fact of life in our industry, which prizes youth and particularly its willingness to work long hours for little pay.

In his blog, Lessons of Failure, Dave Rodenbaugh debunks five myths about “older” software developers:

  • Myth: Older software developers are more expensive than younger ones, making younger developers more desirable.
    • Reality: Younger means cheaper, but a team of nothing but young’uns without much experience will cost you in the long run. Hiring experienced people is like getting insurance against some of the classic mistakes in project management and software development that you only truly learn in the School of Hard Knocks.
  • Myth: Older software developers are less flexible and less capable of learning new technologies because of their legacy knowledge.
    • Reality: It’s experience that makes software developers more capable of migrating to new technologies, frameworks and systems more quickly and in greater depth.
  • Myth: Older software developers are less able to perform the arduous tasks of software development (read:  work long, painful hours) because of family commitments and other attachments that younger workers don’t have.
    • Reality: They’ve learned the hard way that there’s a point of diminishing returns with long hours. I know I did.
  • Myth: Older software developers are less mentally agile than younger ones.
    • Reality: Yes, aging slows down the brain a little, but thinking faster isn’t always better. There’s also thinking wisely and using good judgment. To quote the old adage: “Good judgment comes from experience, experience from bad judgment.”
  • Myth: Older software developers are more jaded and cynical and therefore, less desirable in the workplace than younger ones.  Younger developers are more enthusiastic than older ones.
    • Reality: Passion is passion. If you have it for your job at 40, you probably really love that field. I know I do. [Joey’s note: Besides, have you met members of Generation Y? For a crowd so young, they’re an incredibly cynical and jaded bunch. I blame Gossip Girl.]

Why Matt Hidinger Loves ASP.NET MVC

Matt Hidinger I’m going to express a personal preference: I’d much rather build web apps with ASP.NET MVC than with Web forms. That’s the PHP-and-Smarty/Ruby on Rails developer in me talking. Matt Hidinger documents a “Web Forms vs. ASP.NET MVC” debate he had on IRC and lists these major points:

  • Fallacy: Web forms does everything I need it to.
    • Matt’s response: “getting something done, and getting something done in a testable, maintainable, long-term way, are entirely different”
  • Fallacy: MVC is just a bunch of <%= HtmlHelpers %>.
    • Matt’s response: “HtmlHelpers are 4% of the ASP.NET MVC platform. That’s like saying <asp:Textbox> is all of asp.net web forms” – he also points to an article titled Controls Do Not Make You More Productive.
  • Fallacy: Web forms is easier.
    • Matt’s response: “developers every day struggle with dynamic controls and databinding in even slightly-complex real-world scenarios. Mindlessly tweaking code and refreshing the page to see what ASP.NET will render.”

Matt also lists a series of facts, which I agree with:

  • Web forms is black magic
  • MVC enables robust Ajax support
  • MVC is closer to the metal
  • Data binding is confusing, full of indirection and runtime logic
  • MVC lends itself to good design
  • Web forms is miserable without JavaScript
  • MVC is testable
  • MVC allows multiple <form> tags

“I like coding. I hate shipping software.”

Microsoft "Ship-It" award for Sriram Krishnan, who shipped Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0

Trey Stout says that shipping has all the worst elements of development, namely:

  • translating
  • documenting
  • testing
  • DLL hell
  • install scripts
  • customers
  • marketing

Ah, DLL hell, I remember you well. Once, a major customer’s office lost all reporting functionality from software I developed because they got a new printer, whose “install me first” CD added some DLLs which clobbered the ones from my app’s installation.

Trey also says that coding has all the best elements of development:

  • Talking with other developers
  • white boards
  • new tech
  • compilers
  • crazy features
  • jokes in comments
  • feelings of accomplishment.
  • satisfying diff emails

What’s the solution? In my case, it’s to go into developer evangelism. You get to code, and you don’t have to ship (don’t get me wrong – shipping has many rewards). Of course, if you want my job, you will have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Counting Down to Seven: The 7th Mass Medium and its 7 Unique Qualities

Counting Down to Seven (Mar 15th at MIX 10): A series about ideas for mobile apps

Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

You’re going to have to wait a couple more weeks before I can tell you the specifics of Windows Phone 7 development. In the meantime, I thought I’d write about mobile development in general. If you’re new to mobile development, this series will be a nice overview of the field; if you’ve built apps for mobile phones before, think of it as a refresher course, but you might learn something you didn’t know before.

Mobile Design and Development, by Brian Fling

Cover of "Mobile Design and Development" The O’Reilly book Mobile Design and Development is a worthwhile read for anyone who’s planning to build and sell mobile applications. It’s written by Brian Fling, the owner of the “mobiledesign” mailing list (which could use a little love and attention these days), advisor to big brands getting into the mobile space and someone who (according to his author bio) has “worked with a lot of well funded companies that have failed miserably”.

Mobile Design and Development is probably the best general book on mobile development available right now. You’re not going to learn any specific phone’s API from this book; instead, you’ll learn about the industry, its state as of the time the book was published (August 2009) and the sort of things you should be thinking about if you’re developing mobile apps for an audience. While the ever-changing nature of the mobile world means that some of the information in the book has a “sell-by” date, many of the ideas covered in the book will be applicable for much longer.

“The 7th Mass Medium”

By happy coincidence, the version number of our soon-to-be-unleashed mobile OS, 7, keeps popping up in discussions of mobile technology.

The number 7 makes an appearance in Mobile Design and Development’s third chapter, titled Why Mobile? In it, Fling refers to mobile technology as “The 7th Mass Medium”, an term he attributes to Tomi T. Ahonen, author of the book and blog Communities Dominate Brands.

You were probably wondering what the 6 previous mass media are. In chronological order, they’re:

  1. Print
  2. Sound recordings
  3. Cinema
  4. Radio
  5. Television
  6. Internet

The interesting thing about the 7th mass medium is that it encapsulates the previous 6. Although we’re only just beginning to do so, we read, listen, watch and surf on mobile devices.

The 7 Unique Qualities of the 7th Mass Medium

Man on mobile phone: "Yeah, I'm posing for a stock photo right now..." Mobile Design and Development cites an old blog entry of Ahonen’s, in which he lists 5 unique qualities of mobile as a medium. Ahonen wrote a later article, bumping that number up to 7. They’re things worth keeping in mind when you’re designing mobile apps. Depending on your point of view, some of the qualities may be good things or bad things, but no matter what you think of them, you have to account for them. They are:

1. The mobile phone is the first personal mass medium.

We share books and magazines, listen to the radio and dance to DJ en masse, watch TV shows and movies with others, and many households have a computer used by more than one person. But for most people, their mobile phone is theirs and theirs alone.

Ahonen points to a 2006 survey by the advertising agencies BBDO and Proximity in which that 63% of the people surveyed wouldn’t lend their mobile phone to anyone else.

2. The mobile phone is a permanently carried medium.

According to a Morgan Stanley survey from 2007, 91% of the respondents said that they kept the phone within a meter of them day and night, even when in the bathroom or asleep. Many people use it as the 21st century equivalent of the pocket watch, and when I travel, I’ve found it to be a very reliable alarm clock. It’s the computing, communications and media device you have with you all the time.

According to BBDO/Proximity 2006 study cited in the previous point:

  • People in China were choose between retrieving a forgotten wallet or phone at home; 69% chose the phone.
  • Women in Japan have daytime and evening phones, in the same way they have daytime and evening handbags.

3. The mobile phone is the only always-on mass medium.

There may be times when we turn off the ringer and vibrate functions, but the only time most people turn off their mobile phones is when they’re on a plane (and if you fly often, you know that many people turn on their phones moments after the plane’s wheels touch the ground). The closest any other medium comes to always-on is the internet that subset of people who keep a computer with broadband powered up all the time, followed by falling asleep with the TV or radio on.

According to BBDO/Proximity 2006 study cited in the previous point, 81% of youth between the ages of 15 and 20 sleep with their mobile phones turned on.

Woman on mobile phone: "That's odd...I'm posing for a stock photo too!" 4. The mobile phone is the only mass medium with a built-in payment mechanism.

Between the “app store” model for delivering applications and the fact that they’re tied to a networking provider that also acts as a billing agency, mobile phones are the first mass medium with a built-in toll booth. Even people too young to have credit cards can be billed; they can pay for purchases made via their phone through their phone bill with cash.

5. The mobile phone is the only mass medium available at the point of creative inspiration.

This is a direct by-product of mobile phones being always-on and always with us. Even those of us who carry our laptops everywhere have them tucked away in a carry case or bag, and I’m the rare person who always has a camera handy. While popular with the “lifehacker” crowd, not everyone carries a Moleskine notebook for jotting down ideas. But many people carry a mobile phone in an easy-to-reach place. It lets us create content in the form of writing, photos, and audio and video recordings in near real time. This is the basis of citizen journalism (whose effects were recently felt here in Toronto during the recent “cold war” between passengers of our rapid transit system and its employees).

6. The mobile phone is the only mass medium with accurate audience measurement.

“The internet gave us a false promise,” Ahonen writes, but audience measurement wasn’t what its creators had in mind. However, the mobile phone, it’s possible to know what every subscriber does since each is uniquely tied to a specific ID.

According to Ahonen:

  • TV audience measurement can catch 1% of audience data
  • Internet audience measurement can catch 10% of audience data
  • Mobile phone audience measurement can catch 90% of audience data

7. The mobile phone is the only mass medium that captures the social context of media consumption.

By “social context of media consumption”, Ahonen means that with mobile phones, we can measure not just what people use, but with whom. It’s the next generation version of Amazon’s “recommendations” system and a direct result of mobile’s always-on, always-with-us, and audience measurement qualities.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Cloud Cover, Episode 1

Get Microsoft Silverlight
Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in MP4, WMA, WMV and Zune formats.

Cloud Cover is a new show on Microsoft’s Channel 9 that covers the Windows Azure platform. In this first episode, hosts Ryan Dunn and Steve Marx show you:

  • Azure’s Service Management API and how to use PowerShell cmdlets to manage your cloud services, and
  • How to get started quickly with Windows Azure.

They also talk about updates to SQL Azure, Windows Azure drives, new Windows Azure storage management tools and Azure Reader architecture.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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EnergizeIT: Coming to 20 Cities Across Canada

EnergizeIT: Anything is Possible - March/April 2010

Whenever you do anything where money changes hands, from getting cash from the ATM to buying anything – movie tickets, groceries, a new pair of shoes or a new car to booking a flight and hotel room, chances are that there’s some Microsoft technology involved. It could be an SQL Server database, an app written in Visual Studio, a site living on IIS or Azure or a business process powered by SharePoint, and more likely than not, someone was using Office as well. From devices that fit in your pocket to cavernous data centres, the Microsoft platform helps millions of people across a broad spectrum of industries get real work done every day.

Want to know what’s possible with the Microsoft-based platform? Want to know how it all fits together? That’s what the EnergizeIT 2010 tour is for. In March and April, we’re visiting 20 cities across Canada – as far west as Victoria and as far east as St. John’s – to host free local gatherings where we show you how you can take advantage of our tools and technology to drive your business and your career.

EnergizeIT will comprise different sorts of events in different cities, all of which are listed below.

The “From the Client to the Cloud” Full-Day Events
(Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal)

City skylines: Vancouver (YVR), Edmonton (YEG), Calgary (YYC), Ottawa (YOW), Toronto (YYZ), Montreal (YUL)

In Canada’s six largest cities, we’ll hold our EnergizeIT From the Client to the Cloud full-day events, where we’ll cover the Microsoft-based platform in detail. And yes, even though it’s full-day, it’ll still be free!

In the morning, we’ll talk about the big picture. We’ll show you a scenario featuring the Microsoft-based platform as seen from different points of view: the customer, the information worker, the developer and the IT professional. You’ll see our latest and greatest as well as our up-and-coming developer goodies: Silverlight, .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. We’ll show you Windows 7 and Azure in action, talk about Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and tell you how all of Microsoft’s stuff works together.

Just as the morning session answers the question “What’s the latest technology?”, the afternoon sessions answer the question “How do I get to the latest technology from where I am now?” These sessions, split into two tracks – one on infrastructure management and deployment, one on the development process – will cover what you can do with our tools and technology in a little more depth. They’ll show you what you need to implement what you saw in the morning session and provide a roadmap you can follow to learn more and take action.

For more details about From the Client to the Cloud events or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT From the Client to the Cloud page.

The “Community Connection” Evening Events
(Many Cities Across Canada)

A scene from EnergizeIT 2009 in Mississauga

We’ll also hold Community Connection events in the evening in many cities across Canada, where we’ll do the “big picture” session (the morning session) of our From the Client to the Cloud events.

The Community Connection evening events will take place in the following cities:

  • British Columbia: Vancouver, Kelowna and Victoria
  • Alberta: Edmonton and Calgary
  • Saskatchewan: Regina and Saskatoon
  • Manitoba: Winnipeg
  • Ontario: Ottawa, London, Kitchener and Mississauga
  • Quebec: Montreal, Quebec City and Trois-Rivières
  • Atlantic Canada: Halifax, St. John’s, Moncton and Fredericton

For more details about Community Connection or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT Community Connection page.

Office 2010 Installfests
(Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Montreal, Mississauga)

Microsoft Office 2010 logoI’ve been using the beta and release candidate versions of Office 2010 in my day-to-day work for the past couple of months – PowerPoint for my public speaking stuff, Outlook for email, scheduling and get-things-done stuff and OneNote for my copious note-taking. We’d like you to take it for a spin!

Join us at one of our Microsoft Office 2010 Installfests and we’ll hook you up with the latest build of Office, show you some of our favourite features and demonstrate how to get the most out of our productivity suite.

For more details about the Office 2010 Installfests or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT Office 2010 Installfest page.

Academic Sessions

We’ll also be passing through a number of colleges across Canada, talking to students about getting ready for the working world and showing them resources that they can use to fire up their careers.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Ignite Your Coding Starts March 4th with Andy “Pragmatic Programmer” Hunt!

Ignite Your CodingIt all starts next week on Thursday, March 4th: Ignite Your Coding, the live webcast where we interview some of the biggest brains in the industry, and then hand over the interview to you!

In Ignite Your Coding, my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe and I will talk to developers who’ve made their mark on the industry and ask them how they got started, what sorts of projects they’re working on, what interests them, where they see the industry heading, all with an eye towards helping you make sense of the changes happening in the world of software development. We’ll ask the questions for the first part, but then it’ll be your turn to ask them. The webcast will take place on Thursdays in March and April, and it won’t cost you a thing to catch them.

Our First Guest: Andy Hunt

Andy HuntAre you into agile programming? Andy Hunt co-authored the Manifesto. Does The Pragmatic Programmer occupy a special place on your bookshelf? (And really, it should.) Andy co-wrote that too. Have you ever coded using Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET MVC? Chances are you picked up some knowledge, either directly or indirectly, from a book published by Andy’s book publishing company, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

We’re quite fortunate to have Andy as our first guest, and we’re looking forward to the interview! Our live webcast with Andy will take place on Thursday, March 4th at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific) and run for an hour. To catch the webcast, all you have to do is register – it’s free!

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

There are all sorts of books out there that talk about how to get the most of your programming tools, from IDEs to utilities to languages to frameworks to methodologies. But of all these tools, the most important tool is the one that’s largely ignored: your brain. Enter Andy’s latest book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, which I declared “My Favourite Geek Book of 2008”. There are many books and tools for refactoring your code; this one’s about refactoring your brain. First, it presents the brain in a way that a programmer can grasp:

Diagram showing a "Dual core" model of the brain

…and then talks about the many ways you can refactor it:

  • Cover of "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning"Taking advantage of R-mode (often called the “right brain” in pop psychology), which often gets ignored because of its non-linear, non-linguistic, unpredictable and even “artsy” nature. It’s actually an amazing problem-solver, so much that PT&L suggests that you should “lead with R-mode and follow with L-mode”, or more colloquially, “write drunk; revise sober”.
  • Working around the bugs in your brain. And there are many, from the primitive “lizard brain” that likes to override our higher cognitive functions to cognitive biases to generational affinity.
  • Learning deliberately: what learning is and isn’t, how to plan to learn, figuring out what your learning style is and how to best take advantage of it, and harnessing mind maps, documentation and teaching in order to learn.
  • Gaining experience, which includes understanding the importance of fun and how pressure kills cognition, learning the “inner game” and why your mantra shouldn’t be “learn to build”, but “build to learn”.
  • Managing focus, a very important topic since there are so many things vying for it, from office interruptions to the siren song of the internet, with email, IM, Twitter, Digg, Reddit and LOLcats. One of my favourite bits in this section was some research whose results indicated that constantly checking your email lowers your effective IQ more than smoking a joint.

Get the book, then meet the author! Register for Andy’s Ignite Your Coding session!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Windows Phone 7: Challenge Accepted!

Hands holding Win 7 Phone that reads "You'll find out at MIX10! (Mar 15)"

"Counting Down to Seven" badge Over at Wired’s Gadget Lab blog, there’s an article titled Microsoft’s Challenge with Windows Phone 7 is Wooing Developers. They saved the most important line for last, and in case you missed it, I’ll repeat it here:

The company plans to preview its development tools at its MIX developers conference next month.

If you can wait three weeks, you’ll get a fuller story. If you attend MIX (Monday, March 15th through Wednesday March 17th at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas), you’ll even get development tools and support!

I agree with the title of the article. Complete changes of direction and the circumstances that dictate them are never easy (but then again, that’s why I signed on with Microsoft: for the challenge). We will have to work hard to gain mobile developers’ interest and trust, and it’s quite clear that we’ll have to reach out to the same sort of independent developer coding away at a kitchen table, cafe or converted warehouse office – the kind who made the apps that made the iPhone what it is today. From what I’ve seen of the developer outreach plans for Windows Phone 7, I think it’s doable.

I’d take the quotes from the people interviewed in the article with a big grain of salt. The writer took the “cover all bases given your deadline” approach and quoted a whopping three people whose collective opinions cover the full spectrum of reactions: one positive, one negative, and one (mostly) neutral. None of their titles suggests “developer”: two are CEOs and one is a COO. The negative guy completely misses the point in his remark about hubs and a cool-looking UI, and the neutral guy seems to be drinking deeply of the anti-RIA kool-aid, dismissing technologies like Flash and Silverlight as made for desktops and not for mobile, while forgetting that other technology now considered to be mobile – like browsers and operating systems — have the same supposed limitations. They were, after all, originally made for the desktop.

I accept the challenge of wooing developers. I know what it’s like, speaking as someone who left Microsoft development in the wake of the dot-com bubble burst for other tools and technologies. But what brought me back were signs of a sea change at Microsoft, from the Xbox to SDL to its initiatives to better “get” the web to dynamic languages and much more, and I think that Windows Phone 7 is part of it.

In the end, the developer whose opinion matters most is you. To that end, I plan to use every resource at my disposal to get the toolkits, tutorials and techniques necessary for Windows Phone 7 development into your hands. I’m going to support your development beyond just the “download this, and here’s the code for Hello, World!” – expect stuff on how to build great mobile experiences, what people are looking for and how to sell your mobile apps. (And hey, if you have any ideas or suggestions, I’m open to them – drop me an email, a tweet or a comment).

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.