Day: November 1, 2011

Windows Embedded Handheld Revitalized

This is very exciting to see. It really seems that Windows Embedded Handheld devices will be important in the upcoming future. As a matter of facts, so important that a brand new blog by Dion Hutchings is not published on MSDN. Different from Windows Phone, Windows Embedded Handheld devices

  • can have different form factors
  • have access to Win32 API’s
  • can run native and managed applications
  • can have additional hardware resources.

For a while it seemed that Microsoft quietly would let go of Windows Mobile (or Windows Embedded Handheld, as I should call it these days). However, with this brand new blog, but also with some encouraging words from Kevin Dallas, it seems that Windows Embedded Handheld is alive and kicking.

Focus on Performance

Sometimes, reality differs a little bit from ideas. I had planned to continue writing about comparing developing for Android and for Windows Phone. It will happen but just a little later. I also planned to blog a lot about Mango, especially since Windows Phone is now officially released in The Netherlands as well. Reality is that I have blogged, but on another blog and in another language. My company has introduced a new blog on which I have been writing over the last 2 months or so. It contains posts with technical information around Microsoft technologies that are relevant for my day-to-day work. Topics vary between Windows Embedded OS Design / application development, Windows 8 Metro Style application development and Windows Phone application development. If you are curious and if you understand the Dutch language, you can take a look at the Alten PTS TechCorner.

For the upcoming two months I again have some plans, but this time they will become reality. There are a few upcoming events where I will speak about using the profiler that is part of the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK tools. Understanding how to use the profiler and how to act on profiling results will help you improve performance of your Windows Phone applications. However, there is much more you can regarding application performance. Do you support Fast Application Switching in your own applications? Are you using Background Agents and against which price? Are you using IsolatedStorage as efficient as possible inside your own applications? What does that even mean: “using IsolatedStorage efficient”? What are the (performance) costs of persisting data in your application and how can you limit those costs? These are questions that I will answer in the upcoming months by showing sample code, showing lots of profiling results and writing / talking about performance. This is a topic I am passionate about. Hopefully you are as well. After all, performance is important for phone applications. End users will appreciate Windows Phone even better if all our applications will have great performance and batteries can be charged less frequent. Stay tuned, those performance posts will be published soon.