After four WinDays and one SecurityDays it was about time to spend some quality time with Windows Mobile developers on second Mobility Day conference. Well, it wasn’t second, few were held and there was a brief pause and Mobility Day was born again :) With 3 tracks (DEV, ITPro and Business) which contained 6 lectures it wasn’t a conference to miss. As expected, Windows Mobile 6.5 was the focus as it is expected it is going to be published early next month along with a large number of other products.

For me, most interesting lectures were first two in Business track and last three in DEV track so let’s take a brief review what was going on on those lectures. First lecture was mostly about Microsoft Tag service  and building GoMap! Location aware application based on building maps and bar-code developed by Microsoft. Although an interesting solution for finding your way in closed spaces even today technologies exist that can easily replace scanning bar-code on someone office. Second lecture was really a presentation of previously developed application and the whole lecture was like listening to someone who is trying to sell me a poorly named and designed application. The know-how was mentioned only by it’s name and that was about it… Too bad, it could have been a great lecture with some interesting points and results. My third lecture of the day was about using newly added functionalities to Windows Mobile phones like GSensor (orientation aware), light sensor and stylus sensor. Great demos and a great presenter made this one of the best lectures of the day! Andrej Radinger made development of interesting Windows Mobile applications seem like a child game! Next up was Josip Medved who presented creation of location aware application using Microsoft GPS intermediary driver for Windows Mobile. Although this is a well know thing in this lecture it was deeply connected to new Microsoft service called Bing Maps which is supposed to be a rival to Google Maps. Can Bing Maps make a breakthrough time will tell, but with Mireo providing maps for TeleAtlas who is BTW supplying maps for Google Maps, Google is in big advantage! And the last lecture of the day, made this conference worth visiting next year! Andy Wigley is one hell of a speaker with extensive knowledge and it is a great pleasure listening him talk. Do you remember Mobile Client Software Factory? No? Can’t blame you… It was a project that was supposed to help develop Windows Mobile applications. Well it did help, but it was bloated and slowed down applications to the limit of usability. But some great stuff was learned from that project and some of the great code and ideas from that project were resurrected and implemented in patterns & practices Mobile Application Blocks. What this does it that is simplifies many of the stuff that Windows Mobile developers have to rewrite for each and every application again and again (how many times have you wrote an application that has to store some data locally and afterwards sync it with master server because you couldn’t rely on devices network connection?). Enough said about it, just visit http://mobile.codeplex.com and http://mobilecontrib.codeplex.com and be amazed!