What a nasty surprise

It turns out that the new Visual Studio 2010 does not longer support development for Windows Miobile Versions prior to 7.0. I could not even suppose such a drawback and refused to believe my colleges telling me that, until I convinced myself. Mobile development on Microsoft platform is not my current core activity. In the long list of improvements for VS2010 it did not occur to me to start looking for missing features. That's why I failed to discover it earlier. That is really disappointing. Now I'm stuck to have both VS2008 and VS2010 installed on my developer PC.

Here is how MS presents this unfortunate fact:

Visual Studio 2010

Smart Device Development

Visual Studio 2010 does not support mobile application development for versions of Windows Phone prior to Windows Phone OS 7.0.
More to read here...

I find it unfair not to mention the abolition of this very important feature in the VS2010 highlights list. For me the VS mobile development feature is much more important than the whole bunch of  new Azure & Co. ones

Nuance and RIM cooperation

We planned to make a small research as to usage of ASR/TTS on Blackberry.

According to the recent information there is a cooperation between Nuance and RIM ongoing to deliver in the next year a common solution, like TTS to get the incoming emails be read aloud or using voice commands working with calendar, dialling or whatsoever.

I'm looking forward to what comes in the next year. But I'm glad that RIM at last recognized the necessity of delivering a voice recognition / text-to-speech solution for Blackberry. I hope that the Blackberry Java API will be extended to provide support for these new features also in custom made applications.

A real picture of ASR usage on a mobile device

Hello again, it's been a long time since my last message. I'd like to give a brief summary about the progress of our project concerning ASR and TTS. We have successfully implemented a pilot application using ASR engine of Nuance. Still being not perfect, it helped us to ensure the financing for a successive project in the next year.

ASR is a very complex topic. It is not enough to merely utilize API of a ASR framework in order to get reliable recognition results. As much important as the API usage is to understand how speech recognition works. How voice is recorded, what are hardware parameters, how it is analyzed. These are crucial questions leading to success or contrariwise.

Speaking in particular of Nuance ASR Vocon, there are dozens of parameters, which can be tuned to bring recognition ratio from 0 to 100 per cent. The problem thereby is, there is no unique, the one right settings list, that could satisfy all needs. It is very business case and application specific. It really depends on if data collection or application control via voice is performed. It's an illusion to think one can get good recognition results without vendor support in reasonable time. And under costs pressure and in face of project deadlines just forget about it.

But I think now we have sufficient know-how to build voice enabled applications. Next year project is to improve recognition results, bring them to a good confidence level and enhance the solution through the usage of TTS to deliver a user recognition confirmation via voice. That would complement a real hands-and-eyes-free solution.

What type of Blackberry application is appropriate?

There are 3 way for custom applications on Blackberry: J2ME, MDS or Blackberry browser application. A question is which way to go in which case. We have discussed this topic with the guys from RIM during our workshop in Waterloo, Canada. I have summarised the results of this discussion in the following table, which I think may be a useful basis for decision-making during the planning phase of a project. (click on the picture for a larger view)

My first impressions on Blackberry Plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio

After a very restorative vacation I have at last found time to play around with the new Blackberry Plugin for Visual Studio. My general impression after spending a couple of hours with this software is very positive.

Bit a problem was to get it installed. I have required to reboot my pc several times until the installation was successful. Very strange that a Microsoft SQL server is a required component for this plugin and though I already had it installed, it could not be found by the installer. I don't know what it has been doing, but I left it running during the lunch break. And it was there when I returned. What a nice surprise!

Nevertheless the plugin looks very good. It gives more control over the source code and program logic comparing with MDS Studio applications. It supports references to web services as one knows it from Visual Studio projects: add web reference --> pick up a web service --> client stubs are created by the ide and can be used. It is pretty straightforward. another thing to mention is that web services can also be called asynchronously. The programming language for own classes remains java script - just as in MDS Studio. A little irritating is that intellisence still shows visual studio reserved words like try, catch, class and so on that in fact are not valid language constructs in an MDS application. An error comes on compiling the project. There was also a strange behavior after creating a new project I could not compile it at all. I just said new Blackberry MDS Runtime application, made no changes to it and it would not start. The reason was an ampersand in the settings.mds file in the vendor field. But the error message delivered no reasonable hint to the problem: '"' is an unexpected token. The expected token is ';'. Line 2, position 119. Unfortunately no info or whatsoever about the file where the error occurred.

But these are minor issues. In general the plugin works good. Much more stable application deployment in the emulator than in MDS Studio, extended web services support and scripting, ability to create custom classes, new UI controls make the Blackberry Plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio a very powerful and comfortable application development tool for Blackberry.
Here is a product link:
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/downloads/mvsplugin.jsp

Nuance Vocon 3.2

And the last test candidate from the list. We have accomplished the first tests with Nuance Vocon speech engine, speaker independent mobile ASR framework. The results are astonishing and even exceeded my expectations. It has a good confidentiality ratio with combinations of words and phrases, flexible and yet powerful in defining the speech grammars. Though it provided to be of no use in recognizing alphabetized pronounced words. The golden rule here is, the longer the pronounced word (or phrase) is, the better confidentiality level can be expected in recognition.
Although there is no .NET wrapper for the framework libraries for Windows Mobile, I think we'll go for Vocon. We'll try to define the range of functionality needed in our applications and wrap the required functions to use them in .NET Compact Framework projects. The ASR engine will be used to recognize application specific commands and input data. The mobile application will gather them from the ASR engine and react accordingly.
One last thing to mention, TTS engine is merchandised separately from ASR, it is not an integral part of Vocon.

You can visit http://www.nuance.com/vocon/ for more information

Blackberry Visual Studio Plugin available for USA and Canada

Those who try to download it from elsewhere in the world will get this error:

"We're Sorry...

• We apologize but your IP comes from a country which does not permit downloading of our software. For further information or assistance, please contact webmaster@rim.com."

According to RIM, it should be shortly available for "the rest of the world".

RIM also announced a Web Cast for this Plugin on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 3pm EST.

Here is a registration link: Introduction to the BlackBerry Plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio. Unfortunately I will not be able to visit it. In that very time I will be having vacation on Majorca. But I'm not giving up. After all there may be WiFi access at the hotel :-)

P.S. According to the guys from RIM, an export permit from the Canadian government is pending. As soon as it is issued, the Plugin will be available for download.

Gartner's View of Enterprise Mobility

On the 16 July, Gartner has published its view of the enterprise mobility for the upcoming years. It sheds light on such issues, as manageability of mobile devices, need of unification of development environments, rapid growth of the number of vertical applications, problems the infrastructure departments are facing with and importance of evolving user groups and profiles to support different user requirements on applications and devices.

The analysis of the current situation in this sector is precise and very well reflects existing problems. One thing stunned me though. I would not dare to make a prognose till the year 2012 in so rapidly developing technology sector. When I look back at the year 2002, that is also 5 years ago from now, I don't think one could forecast e.g. how many devices would have WLAN on board or what would be an average ROM size. Not that it's unpredictable, I could have said than back it would be "more and better", but no concrete figures with probability.
Statements like 50% of devices will have hardware virtualization support and that is with 60% probability?! What is a value of 60% probability? 60% is slightly more then 50%, which means it may happen just as well as may not.

I mean, one thing is to mention that most probable in the near future there will be no smartphone which does not have bluetooth support or whatever while discussing such issues with colleges or friends. But another thing is to publish such figures in an official research report of such respective body as Gartner. I'm really curious how the guys made their calculations.

The full version of this document can be obtained via download from Gartner web site at:
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=509666
unfortunately (or maybe luckily ) not for free.

Visiting RIM in Waterloo, Canada

I just wanted to give a brief expression of my visit at RIM in Waterloo last week. The guys know what they do and they do it very well. Even on the senior management level there is a deep understanding of the technologies used and aimed at. The roadmap of the devices and software development is very impressive. I wish I could tell here more not having to breach the NDA.

Good luck RIM on your way to deliver comfortable and reliable mobile services !

News to Blackberry Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio

The anticipated plug-in will be available very soon, in a week or two, as a free download from the Blackberry developer's site.
Against my own expectations there will be no support for .NET framework on the Blackberry. Microsoft Visual Studio can be used as IDE with the direct emulator connectivity to build MDS Studio applications.
Here is a link for more information and some nice screen shots of the plug-in in the IDE: BlackBerry Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio