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Two Big Developments for Tablet PC
Frank Gocinski, Microsoft's ISV Business Development Evangelist Manager, discusses major developments for Tablet PC.

February 2005

Note: This is a transcript of an interview conducted at VSLive! San Francisco.

Patrick Meader: Frank Gocinski is the ISV Business Development Evangelist Manager at Microsoft. We're here to discuss the major developments with Tablet PC, especially as they relate to the announcements here at the conference. Could you walk us through some of the major announcements that you're making with respect to that device?

Frank Gocinski: We've made two major announcements for Tablet PC around our developer ecosystem. First, we announced the InfiNotes control in partnership with our friends at Agilix Labs. InfiNotes is an enriched note-taking control, one that enables you to implement its functionality using drag-and-drop. Simply open up your Win or Web Form, grab the control, drop it onto that form, and you have full journal-like capability in your application. What used to take developers a couple of months to implement can now be done in a day or two.

We're excited about this control because developers have been asking for this type of capability, and we're able to deliver it now with a free standard control that Agilix will be shipping. You can go to infinotes.com to find out more about that control. Agilix also has a professional version of the control that incorporates additional features, such as tabbing and multi-page support.

The consistent feedback from the corporate-minded business developer to date has been that they want to integrate this rich note-taking experience into their existing applications. What shipped with the platform prior to InfiNotes was a neat picture control, but using that control to implement the desired functionality took a lot of time and effort. In many cases, we've seen Tablet PC deployments stall because this capability was too hard to introduce. So, we're excited from the perspective that now we're going to see those corporate applications able to implement this functionality with drag-and-drop simplicity.

PM: You've mentioned the note-taking aspect of developing for Tablet PC. One of the major concerns for developers is, what do you have to know in order to implement proper—not just Tablet PC—but mobile applications in general? What do you tell developers when they're looking for information on standards or proper approaches to doing this?

FG: We're trying to use our development center—msdn.microsoft.com/tabletpc—as our primary portal to communicate this kind of information to the developer community. This site is updated regularly. We have a lot of input from people in the field/community, folks with a lot of activity around that site.

I think the primary thing that we're hearing today from our customers, our end users, is that they want access to their applications anywhere and any time. And that puts a different set of requirements on a developer. You can no longer build an application and assume it's being plugged into the wall, assume it has Internet connectivity throughout its life, and assume it's being displayed in a landscape mode on a large monitor. That is not the case anymore. That machine's going to go with the customer, and the customer is going to walk through the halls. The customer might go from wireless access point to wireless access point, or he might run through battery power until the battery is completely depleted.

Application developers need to start thinking about building apps that are truly good citizens in the mobile environment. And that's the part of our message for this show. We're talking about pen and ink as an integral part of the experience when you go mobile, but there are other considerations that developers need to take into account when they're building these applications.