I think I can safely say that, to date, I've not really released anything that I could consider popular. Things like The Vista Syn are useful tools for a very limited audience. That's exactly what I expected when I released ArkSwitch, a finger-friendly Windows Mobile 6.5.1+ task manager. After all - it's a task manager, which there are plenty of out there; for an unreleased version of WinMo; and it doesn't even have the coolest features of other task managers, like taking over the X button.

Well, that's not entirely how it happened.

Recently, a leaked version of .NET CF "3.7" has surfaced on XDA-Developers. I decided to take a look at it to see what's different. Unfortunately, only the mobile runtime is available, so no easy access to development tools. However, that doesn't stop Red Gate's .NET Reflector from peeking at the insides of a lot of these DLLs.

For some time, I've been considering writing my own UI framework on top of .NET CF as a more attractive, as well as more functional and extensible, alternative to WinForms. WinForms controls in Windows Mobile are limited, especially in the context of .NET CF. The biggest limiting factor concerning their attractiveness is the fact that controls simply do not support transparency natively. Sure, there are ways of doing certain types of transparency when drawing, but there are no good ways of implementing that on top of individual WinForms controls. That is why I have really wanted to write my own framework for this.

Avalanche IM, currently in the works, is an instant messaging application for Windows Mobile. The reason I am writing Yet Another IM App (YAIMA? ) is that, out of all the Windows Mobile IM apps I've tried, none are quite what I've been looking for. Some use too much CPU, others crash randomly, and many aren't free.