A Barron’s report by Trip Chowndry said that 7 minutes of Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote have been reserved for a presentation from MS. Possible presenters are Steve Ballmer or Bob Muglia, head of Microsoft’s server and tools business.
According to the Chowdhry, MS may announce Visual Studio 2010 will enable developers to write native iPhone, iPad and Mac OS X apps. There is no word if VS will be native on the Mac, but I think it goes without saying, it will be.
“IF” this is true, it is brilliant by both Apple and MS. As much as they both dislike each other, they both hate Google. MS Mobile is getting killed by Apple and Android and Steve Jobs got burned by Google’s CEO when the CEO was on Apple’s board.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
“IF” this is true MS would likely make a migration tool (similar to what MS did for port OS/2 Apps to MFC) for iPhone Xcode projects to work on the new Windows Mobile Platform to be released later this year. This may enable developers to more easily port their iPhone apps to Windows Mobile and leap frogging the number of Android.
I am sure developers will still need to use Objective-C and the iPhone SDK in VS for their iPhone apps, but I would willing to bet at some time they make it possible to have common projects for both Window Mobile and iPhone apps. (i.e. an Objective-C code base and a .Net code base)
“IF” this is true, I think most developers will welcome this. As good as Xcode is, Visual Studio is better in a number of ways. But we will see. Lots of speculation and conjecture going on here. But you can bet, I will be in line early at WWDC on June 7th.
It’s a good time to be a developer.
Gary Bennett
President
xcelMe.com