New Tools for Migrating Databases to Windows Phone
With Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" starting to reach end users phones, Microsoft is releasing tools and sample code to help developers port their iPhone and Android mobile apps to the updated Microsoft platform.
On Monday, Jean-Christophe Cimetiere of Microsoft, blogged about a new mobile database conversion tool called SQLite2CE. Available on CodePlex, it converts your mobile app database to SQL Server Compact and creates the default classes necessary for running it on Windows Phone, according to Cimetiere. Microsoft is also offering a free utility, SQLiteQuery2LINQ on CodePlex to convert SQL queries into Microsoft's Language Integrated Query (LINQ).
With Steve Jobs's death, interest in Apple products is higher than ever. I was at the Apple store in Boston over the weekend and a sizable crowd was outside the store photographing the memorial of heartfelt notes, bouquets, apples with bites out of them and the like.
Apple didn't create the app store concept but Steve Jobs and company definitely created the consumer market for mobile apps. I covered the launch of the Apple App Store in a Mobile Revolution cover story in Redmond Developer News in the summer of 2008 and asked, "Will a paradigm shift rock the mobile application industry if the iTunes App Store strikes a chord with users?" At the time, many of the Windows Mobile developers I talked to thought that it would, despite comments about the strength of Microsoft's developer tools, including SQL Server Compact versus SQL Lite.
Back then, Apple had about 1,100 apps versus 18,000 Windows Mobile apps but people didn't realize it, said Ellen Craw, the general manager of longtime Windows Mobile app development company Ilium Software. "There were MP3 players way before the iPod, but nobody made it big until Apple," she told me in 2008. "Research in Motion was looking at the PDA market and thinking, 'Yes, this is what it should be,' and then Apple showed people how huge it can be. We always believed it could be huge."
"Nobody made it big until Apple" is an apt description of the company's phenomenal success in the MP3 and music industries, App Store and smartphones, and now tablets. It will be interesting to see what happens with iCloud.
At the end of a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs noted a motto of his that came from the back page of the final issue of The Whole Earth Catalog: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Thanks for following your dreams Steve.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 10/11/2011 at 5:16 PM