Microsoft with Visual Studio 2005 has pledged to provide
mobile application developers with the same facilities as desktop
developers.
Due to ship next year, Visual Studio 2005 will support native
Active Template Library (ATL) to ease development of C++
applications for devices, said Jonathan Wells, product manager for
Microsoft .net Compact Framework.
Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), will also be extended to
mobile development. Embedded Visual C, for building component
object model (Com) objects, will be included as well and cease to
be its own product, although existing versions still will be
supported. These Com objects can be extended to devices.
"We're bringing all of our tools in the 2005 timeframe into
Visual Studio, all in one package," Wells said.
Developers in Visual Studio 2005 also will get easier access to
POOM (Pocket Outlook Object Model), said Irwin Rodrigues, lead
product manager in the Microsoft Mobile Devices Division. POOM
enables access to Outlook facilities such as mail contacts.
Visual Studio will also feature wizard technology making it
easier to replicate between the upcoming SQL Server 2005 database
and the mobile version of the database. The mobile database, called
SQL Server CE, will be renamed SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition.
"We're going to support a future version of the Windows Mobile
smart phone, and on top of that we're going to support TabletPC,"
said Kevin Collins, senior program manager for SQL Server CE. This
provides for the same data store and behaviour across different
applications.
Visual Studio 2005 also makes it easier to synchronise data
between databases such as Oracle and IBM DB2 and the mobile version
of SQL Server, through data transformation services tools.
Paul Krill writes for Infoworld