Microsoft's Smartphone 2003 SDK Released

cd_Csc writes "Microsoft's long awaited Smartphone 2003 SDK was released today. This free download is critical milestone for the Smartphone platform. For the first time, developers are now able to use the .NET Compact Framework to write Smartphone applications using Visual Studio. At Smartphone Thoughts, we have listed the details of what's new in the 2003 SDK along with some screen shots of enhancements to the Inbox and Internet Explorer applications."

Comments

API Reference

[SamBeckett]

bool makeCall(long phoneNumber) - Calls phonenumber. Must be in (xxx)xxx-xxxx format. Returns true on success.

void hangUp() - Hang up the phone. Has no effect if phone is already hung up.

void blueScreen(double p) - Crash the phone with probability p, sampled every 100 cycles, or whenever the user is on phone with his boss. This is determined by the address book.

Re:API Reference

[Anonymous Coward]

you've never seen an API made my microsoft before have you?

that would be

__fastcall bool CMobileDevice::MakeCall (long lPhoneNumber, const CString *StrOptions)

void CCallerObject::PreformHangUp(void *objCaller)


the BSOD is actually a template that they include with every application they develop. Recoding it everytime would take far too much time.. At this time, it's the only known example of succesfull code-reuse in any C++ project outside academia.

Chicken and egg situation

[Peter Cooper]

The XHTML support in these phones is great! As a bit of an XHTML/CSS advocate myself, however, I think browsing the Web from such space-limited devices could become a chicken and egg situation.

A LOT of pages out there are poorly coded FrontPage (or even MS Publisher) not-even-HTML 3.2-compliant junk. There are a lot of amazingly beautiful XHTML/CSS coded pages out there, and they all display well on the small screens.

How many people will buy these phones, surf to their favorite page, and then discover they can't get anywhere fast? Will devices like smartphones and portable computers, with and 3G's ability to access the Internet at speed, force more Web designers to follow the chosen path and design in a fully backwards, and forwards, compatable way with XHTML and CSS? Or will we have a chicken and egg situation where people are turned off from using the devices because the content and pages available to them are so poor.. just like with WAP.

No VBScript?

[goranb]

From Why Develop for Windows Mobile-based Devices?:
Pocket Internet Explorer is a full Internet browser with support for HTML, XML/XSL, WML, cHTML, Jscript & SSL.

What happened to VBScript? Not that I'm a fan of VBScript (I hate it for web pages, but it's great as a substitute for batch files...), but still... I have come across many web pages that give out VBScript code in pages when browsing with IE...

Long awaited

[ultrabot]

Microsoft's long awaited Smartphone 2003 SDK was released today.

Not a slashdot regular, are you?

Really, it is critical that Smartphone not be allowed to succeed. We don't want Microsoft gaining a significant market share there also. If they happen to get something like 20%, they will start "integrating" a lot of proprietary interop stuff to Windows and aggressively wrestle up the marketshare. MSFT Windows/Offics business is winding down, so Smartphones are an excellent migration route because people actually buy new phones all the time.

Symbian is not all that "open", but they have to support public standards, because they have no choice. Do the industry a favor and boycott handsets that run SmartPhone. I don't know how much it is going to help though, because MSFT has endless stash of money to throw to these "strategic" projects. They are not going to drop out even if they sold zero licenses in 10 year.

Obviously multiple platforms means competition, which brings a little bit energy to the market. Smartphones will be a huge thing in a few years, so platform developers can't really be sitting on their asses for long.

Re:DDOS

[ultrabot]

I imagine it won't be too long before someone will figure out how to write a worm to DDOS a companies phone system!

And such a worm would be a boon for operators that charge for calls. Expect the operators' share prices to skyrocket whenever a worm alarm is given :-).

I think the phones should have a hardware "lock" that would require the user to explicitly allow doing an operation that will cost them money.

Re:Why would anyone buy one?

[Chanc_Gorkon]

First, assuming Smartphone is like any other Microsoft os is stupid. Smartphone is of course based on the same os that runs Windows Mobile 2003. I have NEVER had a blue screen because there's no such thing on the platform. I have never had a crash take the whole device down either. It's much more robust and boots rather fast so a soft reset is bound to not annoy too much (although when your testing some unstable code to make things like a USB to Serial cable work on a Toshiba e740, it's kind of hairy! :) ). Smartphone has been reported to have problems. Non of these are verifiable to the US market because NOONE HAS THESE YET! By the time these are finally available, T-Mobile will end up being king of GPRS in the states because they have a 29.99 unlimited plan (or 19.99 with a voice plan). So your fear of having a several hundered dollar GPRS bill because of a worm is unfounded. BTW, Smartphone and WM 2003 are pretty locked down. No services run that are open all of the time. Sure, e-mail works so port 25 is open, but the e-mail program can't even understand html let alone the outlook virus code stuff. The e-mail client works best with straight text (e-mail should have never ventured into html or ActiveX code either).

Finaly

[Biomechanoid]

"Microsoft's long awaited Smartphone 2003 SDK was released today.

For months I slept in a tent before a Microsoft office. I cant wait to pick up my smart phone and start using the SDK for days on end. I will be loosing sleep for whole weeks.

When my first pieces of code are ready I will walk across the street screeming, jumping up and down and showing it to people so they can share the experiences I feel with the Microsoft Smartphone 2003 SDK.