This is quote from a former co-worker (I use the root “work” in that term very loosely). It’s not the way I like to work. Being a software architect for so long, I’m used to having a plan. Like requirements documents. Architectural diagrams. Some picture of what I’m supposed to build. In my current role, it’s a stretch for me --- I operate without a net more often that is really comfortable, but I think it’s good for me.
I was onsite with one of my customers today to lead a really interesting conversation around developing applications for mobile devices. I don’t often get to talk about what I really love (I spend a lot more time talking about core infrastructure than development), so I was really looking forward to the opportunity. But this was one of those “change the plan at the eleventh hour” situations; I had to throw out the deck I wanted to present based on the customer’s feedback at 4:00 pm yesterday. Reworked the plan, created a new deck, and I think I delivered what they wanted to see.
This presentation was for a multinational manufacturing firm I cover in Memphis. Their development team creates lots of process-automation applications for Windows and a multitude of mobile devices. They are struggling with what are unfortunately very common challenges --- they have many years of .NET development expertise on the team, but are trying to find ways to leverage that to reach the Blackberry, iOS and Android devices they know are exploding among their user base. We talked a little about some interesting angles like MonoTouch (using C# to develop for iOS, for example), an option they have investigated, but they are running into the same struggles I’m having as I try to expand my skills.
XCode and UIBuilder with Objective C really don’t come anywhere close to being as mature as Visual Studio and C#. And for someone like me who’s really never developed without a modern IDE, it’s frustrating. Yet there are thousands of developers who swear by the developer experience on the Mac. I’m trying to be patient.
We talked a little about SharePoint on mobile devices, too. My coworker Phil earned some kudos recently for an awesome demo he’s developed to showcase just a few of the strengths of SharePoint on Windows Phone 7. It’s a great demo I encourage all my SharePoint customers to see.
Our best story for how we support mobile development across platforms right now really focuses on the Windows Azure platform. And the community is contributing some really interesting, time-saving templates and tools to make it easier for you to support multi-tenant scenarios, etc.