Over at Wired’s Gadget Lab blog, there’s an article titled Microsoft’s Challenge with Windows Phone 7 is Wooing Developers. They saved the most important line for last, and in case you missed it, I’ll repeat it here:

The company plans to preview its development tools at its MIX developers conference next month.

If you can wait three weeks, you’ll get a fuller story. If you attend MIX (Monday, March 15th through Wednesday March 17th at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas), you’ll even get development tools and support!

I agree with the title of the article. Complete changes of direction and the circumstances that dictate them are never easy (but then again, that’s why I signed on with Microsoft: for the challenge). We will have to work hard to gain mobile developers’ interest and trust, and it’s quite clear that we’ll have to reach out to the same sort of independent developer coding away at a kitchen table, cafe or converted warehouse office – the kind who made the apps that made the iPhone what it is today. From what I’ve seen of the developer outreach plans for Windows Phone 7, I think it’s doable.

I’d take the quotes from the people interviewed in the article with a big grain of salt. The writer took the “cover all bases given your deadline” approach and quoted a whopping three people whose collective opinions cover the full spectrum of reactions: one positive, one negative, and one (mostly) neutral. None of their titles suggests “developer”: two are CEOs and one is a COO. The negative guy completely misses the point in his remark about hubs and a cool-looking UI, and the neutral guy seems to be drinking deeply of the anti-RIA kool-aid, dismissing technologies like Flash and Silverlight as made for desktops and not for mobile, while forgetting that other technology now considered to be mobile – like browsers and operating systems — have the same supposed limitations. They were, after all, originally made for the desktop.

I accept the challenge of wooing developers. I know what it’s like, speaking as someone who left Microsoft development in the wake of the dot-com bubble burst for other tools and technologies. But what brought me back were signs of a sea change at Microsoft, from the Xbox to SDL to its initiatives to better “get” the web to dynamic languages and much more, and I think that Windows Phone 7 is part of it.

In the end, the developer whose opinion matters most is you. To that end, I plan to use every resource at my disposal to get the toolkits, tutorials and techniques necessary for Windows Phone 7 development into your hands. I’m going to support your development beyond just the “download this, and here’s the code for Hello, World!” – expect stuff on how to build great mobile experiences, what people are looking for and how to sell your mobile apps. (And hey, if you have any ideas or suggestions, I’m open to them – drop me an email, a tweet or a comment).

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

In a comment to Scott Hanselman’s blog post about how Microsoft is using “crowdsourcing” to help create localized versions of MSDN, someone wrote:

If you don’t know English, you’re not a programmer.

A provocative statement like that cries out for an article and discussion, and Scott got the ball rolling with a follow-up article titled, quite expectedly, Do You Have to Know English to be a Programmer?

While a command of the English language isn’t a prerequisite for the actual act of programming, programming languages typically use English keywords, as do many development libraries. Even some popular languages written by people whose native tongue is not English, such as Ruby (Japanese) and Lua (Brazilian Portuguese) use English keywords.

I think that English is the lingua franca of business and technology today: a language often used to communicate between people not sharing a mother tongue. Just as you could have the knack for diplomacy in the 18th century and not speak a word of French, you can have the knack for programming and not know a word of English. But it’s really, really helpful if you do.

Disruption

Soon – probably in December – in addition to pointing you to interesting tech news articles and bits of geek culture, I will also be returning to writing development articles. And yes, that includes the long-on-hiatus Enumerating Enumerable series of articles cataloguing the methods in Ruby’s Enumerable module.

The past couple of months have been disruptive as all Hell, what with:

• My getting laid off at the end of September
• A mad dash of interviews in the first half of October
• A whirlwind hiring at Microsoft
• Flying down to L.A. and drinking from the firehose at PDC 2008

And now,

• Working like mad to acclimate myself with a new employer — my first Fortune 500 company, and my first with over 200 employees!)
• Readjusting to a new work style: working largely from home, with runs out into “the field” and the Mississauga and downtown Toronto offices
• Re-acclimating myself with Microsoft development tools, which I haven’t used since early 2002

It’s been exciting and fun, but there are only so many hours in the day and so much energy one can muster to do things, which meant that the programming articles, which take a lot of work, testing and verifying, had to fall by the wayside. But they’re coming back soon.

Country First

Me and a Mountie at the Canadian Embassy
in Washington, DC in 2000,
a.k.a. the “experimenting with nutty hair colour” year.

“We hired you first and foremost for Canada,” said my boss, John Oxley, Director – Audience Marketing at Microsoft Canada, “and for Microsoft second.”

That means that while I’ll be writing a lot about Microsoft developer tools and technologies, my primary goal as Microsoft Developer Evangelist is to use my tech evangelism powers to encourage, assist, grow and cast a spotlight on the Canadian software industry. I get it; a healthy Canadian software ecosystem is good for all players, including “The Empire”.

If you’re a software developer in Canada, whether you’re writing enterprise software for a big corporation or a one-person shop operating out of your den, a full-time employee or a student in high school, or a Microsoft tech “true believer” or a hardcore Free Software/Open Source type, you are the person I’m trying to reach.

So if you’re a developer, watch this space – some meaty development articles are coming soon!

c|net cites an Evans Data report: “A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP.” Here’s VentureBeat’s take on this report.