Getting your code on

Nothing kills a boring Sunday afternoon like exploring new development environments. In a world where I could stop time, messing with these things would be fun but there is just too little time to dedicate to training, development and project management needed to pull anything decent off. I ran a 10K earlier this morning so I didn’t have much of a choice, here are my new toys:

AJAX – Asynchronous Javascript and XML is a new hot web application infrastructure that everyone is interested in, mostly because it looks cool and brings a look & feel of a desktop application to the web. Why would this be important? Well, say you were developing a new application. Do you want to test it with 6 different versions of Windows and worry about patching it, or would you rather have it on a rapidly deployable environment – such as the web? The answer is obvious. So what does AJAX actually do, in plain english?:

Ajax applications, on the other hand, can send requests to the web server to retrieve only the data that is needed, usually using SOAP or some other XML-based web services dialect. On the client, JavaScript processes the web server response. The result is a more responsive interface, since the amount of data interchanged between the web browser and web server is vastly reduced. Web server processing time is also saved, since much of it is done on the client.

Currently the most popular AJAX applications are courtesy of Google in the way of Gmail and Blogger. To put it in perspective, there was a discussion on SlashDot last week about how Google should port Star Office / Open Office to AJAX and the following brilliant comment really made my day: “Yes, please take a mature desktop application and port it to Javascript so I can run it in my web browser”

Windows Mobile 5 – On the other hand, I’ve been writing some applications for and I was very happy to see that Microsoft has a decent amount of “sales” training materials my PocketPC over at www.windowsmobiletraining.com site. It is primarily designed for PocketPC sales jockeys, but it does have a decent amount of information to help you understand all the advantages of the Windows Mobile 5 platform. If you’re more of a coder, there is a awesome $5 Windows Mobile 5 Development Evaluation Kit:

• Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK for Pocket PC
• Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK for Smartphone
• Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2
• ActiveSync version 4.0
• Microsoft Device Emulator 1.0 Community Preview
• Windows Mobile 5.0 and Visual Studio 2005 white papers and videos
• Information regarding new Windows Mobile partnering opportunities

There also appears to be a fairly active blog on Windows Mobile for Partners that might be worth a look. It appears to be fairly UK centric so prepare to be depressed if you’re in the USA, the third-world of mobile devices.

I’ve updated the links page and added the “email me” section as well. Nothing like a slow weekend.