I've been attending JavaOne for several years, and every year one of the things that amaze me is all the device stuff. I knew about all of the Microsoft device stuff, but I never really appreciated it until this week. On Tuesday or so I got asked to talk at MDC, and since then I've been diving into our mobile technology offerings.

First, I have always seen that smart mobile devices are a key component in the smart client ecosystem. You are not always going to have your laptop or desktop with you, and you need something to access your information. In the past I've played with several CE devices, the Apple Newton, and at least half-a-dozen different cell phones. In their day, the various devices always seemed pretty cool, but I never really had such a desire to program for these until yesterday.

The folks at the MDC gave me a HP iPAQ 4355 to get me up to speed and get an appreciation for where we are today. It is absolutely amazing. I remember seeing the Sharp Zaurus a couple years ago at JavaOne and I was amazed. The device was running a Linux variant with J2ME running on it. I was so frustrated that Microsoft was doing so poorly with our device offerings.

No more.

On thursday I picked up my new device and installed VS .NET 2003, and then the Pocket PC 2003 SDK. Within 5 minutes I had written my first application - using WinForms, and about 1 minute later I was querying web services, browsing the file system, it was amazing.

I talked a bit with the compact framework team when they were developing it (I worked on the WinForms and then .NET Framework class libraries team at the time) and we talked about how they were doing the port, etc. I never really got into programming on the devices, mostly because at the time I was so focused on the desktop, and the device stuff was so immature from a platform sense.

These new devices are absolutely stunning. With built in WiFi and Bluetooth I was syncing mail, running managed code, and talking to web services as I walked the hall. I know this sounds like a commercial, but it was an experience.

I've already run into a bunch of issues with the existing tools and platform though. Accessing data on the device, talking to the contact database, etc - all are really tough today. It is going to be a blast to go down to MDC and talk about what we are doing to make this stuff even better in the future.

In the mean time - I tried using the InTheHand POOM library, but I get a missing method exception when I try to run it on the device... anyone know how to fix it?