S60 Open to new features

Most of the Carbide features are based on direct customer feedback. In more rare occasions we take some risks and implement something that is not what customer tells us he wants but rather us being proactive and implementing a feature that we think would be beneficial. Some of these features are generated in internal discussions, studying industry trends and competition. Once a year an Eclipse Conference event is taking place in Santa Clara, Ca.

http://www.eclipsecon.org/2008/

This year I got a chance to go. And I would greatly recommend it to anyone who is doing open source development or simply looking for some ideas. First day of the conference is probably the most useful; it has 4 2-hour tutorials. The next 3 days are general talks and bird of feathers (general discussion about a particular field of Eclipse development) in the evening. Somehow the conference is structured so that the most interesting/useful info is in the beginning of the conference and then it kind of tapers off. I was pretty overwhelmed by all the tutorials, talks and the amount of information I received at the conference. 3 days would really suffice Beside useful info that one would learn at the conference, which I will discuss in detail in the future posts, it is a great place to meet people who are genuinely passionate at what they do; check out the competition; get info on the latest industry trends from the industry leaders and familiarize yourself with some of the latest features coming into Eclipse that will be available in Carbide sometime later this year or early next year.
Probably the most interesting announcement that was made at the conference is that Microsoft is working hard to get interoperability between Eclipse plugins and Visual Studio. The way I understand it is that we will be able to take Carbide plugins and drop them into Visual Studio and it should work. I would really simplify Nokia’s task of maintaining two versions of Carbide (Eclipse based and Visual Studio based).
I personally met couple Microsoft employees and personally think that they can be trusted Another important thing that we can’t take advantage of but maybe you can is Rich Client Applications – a growing field where one would use all Eclipse infrastructures minus IDE menus to create custom applications and then run it on any platform (Windows, Symbian, and Linux).

PS. If you check out the pictures of the conference you can get an erroneous idea that it was all fun and partying. Somehow the pictures don’t do long days of learning justice…