Windows Mobile 6.5 Development – What about Developers?

For Windows Mobile development there is the Windows Mobile 6 Professional SDK and the Windows Mobile 6 Standard SDK. This “Software Development Kit” is the base of good Windows Mobile development.

Earlier this week Microsoft released a “Developer Tool Kit” (DTK) for Windows Mobile 6.5. This toolkit contains emulators, gesture API’s and other stuff for developing for Windows Mobile 6.5. This toolkit is an “add-on”  on top of Visual Studio and the Windows Mobile 6 SDK’s.

And then there is the “Developer Recourse Kit” or DRK. The DRK is an

offline DVD copy of the most useful and relevant Windows Mobile application development tools and resources. [ref01]

All these are great tools for developers to develop nice Windows Mobile applications. Microsoft is doing a very good job for people who have a Visual Studio 2008 Professional License.

For the other developers however, Microsoft has…. sadly nothing. To me raises the big question: Is Microsoft being helpful enough towards developers  to get them behind their computer and do some serious coding for Windows Mobile? Wouldn’t it be great that any developer uses his creativity by making great Windows Mobile applications.

There are thousands of great developers out there creating applications for Google Android and Apple iPhone. Every single one of them didn’t need to pay to even start creating applications.

When starting developers would like to explore Windows Mobile development they can download the 90-day Visual Studio 2008 Professional trial. After that they have to purchase a license for Visual Studio 2008 Professional (which is around $799 at the Microsoft Site). So Although a lot of developers are using Visual Studio, I think its a major leap for starting developers, or even hobby-developers to start developing for the Windows Mobile platform. I think this is a great loss and I surely think that there are a bunch of developers out there willing to develop for Windows Mobile but just being helt back because of the investment they have to do.

I can understand Microsoft’s point to charge developers for having their application in the upcoming Marketplace. Microsoft facilitates their applications and brings the applications to the public, but I think its sad to see that a very good developer has to do a great investment before his application can actually become a product in the Marketplace.

That’s why I hope Microsoft will re-consider the choice and gives something to starting developers. Something that will make it easier and cheaper to start developing.

Steve Ballmer said it himself:  Developers, developers, developers, developers.

[ref01]: http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2009/06/04/sdk-dtk-drk-wtf.aspx
[ref02]: http://blogs.microsoft.nl/blogs/windowsmobile/ (Dutch)