David McNamee
10-29-2003, 11:30 AM
This year’s Professional Developer Conference has included an early look at the next version of Microsoft’s development tools and platform, codenamed “Whidbey”. There are a number of new things coming for mobile device developers to be excited about.First, Visual Studio “Whidbey” aims to dramatically increase developer productivity. For the first time, both native and managed development environments will be supported by the same tool.Visual Studio will provide native developers with:<ul><li>A new resource editor<li>ATL, MFC, and CSL/STL library support<li>New device cross-compilers<li>Device runtimes brought up to the desktop 8.0 code base<li>The merging of ATL and MFC common functionality</ul>Managed .NET developers will see the following improvements in “Whidbey”:<ul><li>Improved WinForms editor <li>Data Designers<li>More accurate IntelliSense</ul>Both environments will also benefit from updated connectivity technology and remote debugging that will allow developers to attach to running processes.Also in the managed space, the .NET Compact Framework “Whidbey” will feature a number of enhancements. The Compact Framework team is committed to improving the overall performance of the runtime. There will also be:<ul><li>More GUI controls and drawing classes (including a DataGrid for Smartphone!)<li>Designer support for multiple resolutions<li>More XML (XPath, schemas)<li>MSMQ, Authentication and IPV6 for networking<li>SQL CE result set performance improvements<li>Cryptography, registry, and serial port classes<li>Support for generics</ul>There will also be support for COM interoperability in the .NET Compact Framework! No more wrapping your existing components in C-style wrappers just to P/Invoke them.All in all, the improvements in Visual Studio and the .NET Compact Framework are very exciting. It’s going to be even easier to build great applications!