Guests will discuss Smartphone, Pocket PC, and Tablet PC development topics.

The meeting will be held in the Quinalt Room, Building 34 on the Microsoft Redmond Campus, and starts at 6:30 pm.

WE-DIG provided the following summary of what took place at the group's previous meeting . . .

Last Meeting Highlights

Two topics were on the agenda for the previous meeting, held last Wednesday:

• Location-based programming
  
• Inside the SPOT CLR

Steve Lombardi, Microsoft's MapPoint Technical Evangelist, talked about various ways to derive and use location information. You don't need a GPS. Mobile phones can provide location information, which can be very precise when assisted by a GPS device, or a bit less accurate when the location of the cell tower is all that gets reported. But as Lombardi pointed out, even that can be useful when trying to locate a co-worker, or to manage a fleet of commercial delivery trucks. He then went on to describe the (currently un-announced) next version of Pocket Streets, known only by its code name, "Caravel."

For the second half of the meeting, Donald Thompson, Microsoft's Architect for SPOT, discussed the inner details of the software and hardware that makes Smart Personal Objects Technology work. Contrary to rumor, it does not run Windows CE. Instead, SPOT runs something called "TinyCLR", where CLR means "Common Language Runtime." The SPOT team built a 128K managed code runtime that supports the basic data types familiar to .NET programmers. SPOT applications are built using Visual Studio, and can be written in C#.

Joining Thompson were some people from A Dot Corporation who demonstrated a development board for the SPOT hardware. They also showed Visual Studio being used to write code to compile, download, and run. All the features of VS are available to a SPOT developer, including the debugger.

Further information about WE-DIG is available on the group's website.

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