Thursday, March 8, 2007

.Net compact framework for S60

Red Five Labs announced that a first public beta release of their .Net compact framework for S60 is available for download. So, another app framework for S60 phones, I guess we should all be happy about that. Oh well, I don't know. According to a collegue, the performance of .Net on Windows Mobile devices is comparable to Java, and I've never been a fan of mobile Java. But I guess the whole point of having .Net for S60 is that you can get your Windows Mobile software running on S60 devices without having to spend much effort porting them. For other apps I still see very little reason to run anything but native code on open platforms. The performance is dodgy as it is with native code, and inserting a virtual machine between your app and the hardware doesn't help.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against interpreters/VM:s in general, but in most cases the performance and overall user experience just isn't worth it. There are exceptions, such as the mophun gaming middleware, but unlike most other virtual machines, that one actually gives near native performance. Other VM:s, in combination with 3D hardware, might also be suitable for games and multimedia, but besides that, solutions like Java, .Net and Python don't have much use except as toys or prototyping tools.

No comments: