Software GreenHouse - Blue Jab

An exciting new opportunity for mobile developers was launched at the Mobile Developer Conference in Bangalore.

The Software Greenhouse

It's an amazingly interesting opportunity for developers to peak into the innards of how a mobile software is being built. It's a fun application called BlueJab, its a cool and fun utility which takes the social networking concept to a new level. It combines the power of a Windows Mobile device and Bluetooth technology, opening up a completely new way for people to meet, communicate, exchange ideas or maybe even trade.

The entire software development cycle will be exposed to developers so that they have a chance of learning how things are done at each stage of the mobile application development.

There are online forums where the community can discucss the technology and application, there are Webcasts where the team will discuss and showcase finer aspects of the project.

This is if I'm not wrong the first time in India and probably the world where such a unique concept is being explored. This is a new level of reaching out to the developer community. Kudos to Microsoft for this initiaitve.

Check the software greenhouse at http://www.softwaregreenhouse.com

Mobile Developer Conference Bangalore

A major milestone for the Indian Developer community, the first Mobile Developer Conference was held in Bangalore, India from the 9th-11th of Dec 2004. Today is a last day with Hands on Labs being conducted.

It was great fun being at the Mobile developer conference. It had some interesting highlights for me. I got to know I had to do a session on Windows XP embedded at the last moment. Got the slide deck at 12:30 A.M. in the morning and spent some 3 hours after that learning more about it. Unfortunately I couldn't get the tools to load on my machine as I didn't have the software in time. Well anyways it seems a lot of people are interested in Windows XP embedded(XPe). It was good fun a lot of the audience were newbies, as in almost 90% of the audience had not built their own XPe devices or used the tools.

XPe is a compotenized version of XP allowing you to choose and build a custom version of the OS by choosing parts you require and create an OS image. It's a big hit in devices such as Kiosks, Set Top boxes, etc.

The other session I did was on ASP.Net Mobile controls. That covered the new unified control model in Whidbey. In fact I have written about this at Devx.

THE MDC in India had some exciting moments like Software idol. A fun filled evening where the speakers were contestants for the title :-)

For user group members from Bangalore this MDC had a special in terms of a direct meeting with the INTL speakers. This was a exlusive opportunity to have face time with them, and was brought to Bangalore user group members via INETA and local Microsoft.

Overall a very satisfying experience.