Windows Mobile 6.5

Well, it's finally time to get a cell phone for my new company. Since I already have a simple (I hope) iPhone app gig lined up I knew what I was going to get, but was looking at other options for my wife. Not sure if she'll want to go with the iPhone or not, we'll see. We both use Macs for everything, but she already has an iPod Touch that she likes. While looking around I happened to notice their new HTC model running Windows Mobile 6.5 and I have to say it's terrible. Better, but still lagging way behind the competition in usability. They've done a lot o work to make it more touch friendly than the old versions, but there's still a lot of work to be done. It's not hard to find screens where the buttons are almost impossible to use for a fat fingered person like me. And there are still other screens in the options that look like they were written back in the Windows 3.1 days. I can't believe Microsoft is having this much trouble providing an outstanding mobile phone OS. Kind of ticks me off because I'd prefer them to do well. I could write apps for that platform since I know their tools well. I don't want to deal with Blackberry, Palm's new WebOS, or Android (which I think uses Java and I don't know Java from adam) but if they don't get off their duffs and deliver on Windows Mobile 7 it may be too late. Then it'll be time to start learning about Android development I suppose...


About The Author

Ron Grove draws on over ten years of training, network administration and development experience. He loves to work with new technology and see how that technology can be best utilized by his clients. You can find him through his company Evanoah, LLC and his LinkedIn profile is here.

ASP.NET MVC development

The last couple weeks I've been working on figuring out ASP.NET MVC on my companies website and on my new training oriented website at http://www.rongrove.com. Beyond MSDN documentation I've used the official Microsoft asp.net website, various blogs posts, and the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Website Programming book. I've seen a lot of hype about this for Ruby on Rails of course, and I've been exposed to it with Apple's development tools XCode and InterfaceBuilder. At least with InterfaceBuilder it seems much easier. The routes seem really awkward. I can't think of a parallel in the Apple tools I've used. The bindings perhaps? I don't know, but reading the book I mentioned they have a lot of them. Seems like a larger, more complex application is going to have tons of these things unless I'm understanding them incorrectly... I may take a closer look at Ruby on Rails. I'm curious how they do this, but my host is GoDaddy and I think they only support PHP and .NET applications. The one thing I like, and the primary reason I went with it in the first place, was that it's far more SEO friendly. Debugging the output by using "view source" in the browser is far easier than with ASP.NET WebForms because the code is so much cleaner. Well, back to work. I really want to get content on the training site as soon as possible.


About The Author

Ron Grove draws on over ten years of training, network administration and development experience. He loves to work with new technology and see how that technology can be best utilized by his clients. You can find him through his company Evanoah, LLC and his LinkedIn profile is here.