News

At MDC/VSLive: Whidbey makes it to Technical Preview stage

• By John K. Waters
• March 25, 2004

The third annual Mobile Developer Conference (MDC) in San Francisco shared space at the Moscone Center with the VSLive and Avios-SpeechTEK events.

Company head Bill Gates kicked off the joint conferences with a keynote presentation delivered to a packed auditorium in the new Moscone West facility. Event organizers estimated the combined attendance at 4,000, which Microsoft said was the largest gathering of independent developers since last year's PDC in Los Angeles.

"The focus today will be on how mobility-, Web services-, speech- and location-type capabilities are going to come in and be aspects of applications," Gates told the crowd. "And [how] that can be done using the same tools and languages that [developers] are familiar with."

Gates continued to promote his company's ongoing "seamless computing" vision with a number of announcements. Along with the release of Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition, Gates announced the much-anticipated launch of Microsoft Speech Server 2004 and the Community Technical Preview of Visual Studio 2005 (formerly code-named "Whidbey"). Based on natural language recognition technology, Speech Server is a platform for networked computers designed to enable developers to create programs tailored to their needs. The preview version of Visual Studio 2005 includes Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 for smart-device development, which was launched at last year's conference. A preview version of Visual Studio 2005 was distributed at the show as part of the new developer outreach program. Gates said Microsoft plans to release a series of pre-beta versions of the product to targeted segments of the developer community.

Microsoft also released an updated version of the Windows Mobile Developer Resource Kit. The new version comes with eight white papers focused on Windows Mobile development as well as new and updated code samples, Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition emulators, embedded Visual C++ 4.0 SP3 and Windows Mobile 2003 SDKs. The resource kit is available for download.