By Tres Watkins
We just wrapped up exhibiting at Visual Studio Live! Orlando, an event we sponsored with Microsoft. Being exhibiting sponsors, we went in with the mindset that this would be an exercise in disseminating information about our products—delivering the Syncfusion message. By the end of the week, after having spoken to so many developers not just about our products, but about their projects, predictions, and points of pain, it became clear that this event was more so an exchange of ideas than a broadcast of messaging.
This was the first VS Live! event I had personally attended. Going into the event, I knew we would spend substantial time talking about what we, Syncfusion, do as a component vendor. I anticipated conversing about the needs of today’s developers—the features being sought and the technologies being used. I was, however, pleasantly surprised at the number of conversations I had concerning the core reason everyone was in attendance in the first place—their current projects.
This past week I heard of a multitude of cases where .NET was being used to address the needs of some highly specialized sectors. Mapping in oil and gas, tracking genomes in seed breeding, creating an automated battery of questions for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) used in psychiatry and psychology—these were just a few that stood out amid a myriad of others spanning from warehouse management to book publishing.
What I found most remarkable in talking with many developers, working in multiple sectors on a multitude of solutions, is that the conversion would inevitably come to close on one phrase: “But now we’re thinking about mobile.” And upon that point, all eyes would drift to the tablets displayed at our table, as if the promise of a better tomorrow were held within that slim design.
And perhaps it is.
The one common element I found in the business requirements of all these cases, spanning numerous industries, is that each had users roving in the field; it’s those users who want, and are coming to expect, that mobile devices will meet their business needs at work as readily as they have met their personal needs at home.
Throughout the halls of VS Live!, “mobile” was the resounding cry, and it’s my understanding that the sessions on Web and mobile apps garnered heavy interest. So, if we’ve all signed onto mobile, the question now must be how to go forward with it.
We’ll be publishing a series of articles over the coming weeks that will address how to take your current assets from desktop to mobile devices. If you’d like to follow those articles as they are released, subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog; I’ll be posting notifications as articles roll out.
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