I know, I know.  I’ve been MIA since April. I wouldn’t be surprised if no one reads this due to my lack of activity. I just wanted to post a status update on WHS Mobile and outline some reasons to my disappearance.

Well here goes, WHS Mobile development has officially ended until further notice.

I can virtually see your jaws drop. Well, there are multiple reasons behind the kill but here are the main few.

When I decided to stop iPhone development I took into account many variables, starting with the lack of an iPhone for personal use. Programs I actually use tend to be more stable due to the extra testing it goes through during its day to day usage. The fact that I had a Windows Mobile phone and had never had an actual personal iPhone was a big problem. However, I did have a first generation iPhone that I got as a gift from Alexander Kent of Home Server Land as a testing device. That meant I could at least test the application outside of the emulator and use Wi-Fi (no 3G). That was very helpful in testing WHS Mobile in a local setup but did not fulfill my need for testing over 3G and other aspects.

Another problem arose when I started going back to school in order to finish my degree in computer science. I pretty much got overloaded with school work that my site and WHS Mobile took the backburner. I replied to support emails in my free time and pretty soon got frustrated with the amount of emails coming in that I started to give up. Thankfully, I continued to reply to emails when I could. Even though half of them were about the problem iOS 4.x caused with the port not defaulting properly.

The last problem I’ll talk about is that I never had a dedicated Mac computer for development. I mainly used a dual boot Windows laptop that barely ran Leopard. That laptop had ceased to function about four or five months ago. Since then, I had tried using a VMware virtual machine but that was even less reliable. Due to the fact that the iOS SDK is only for OS/X and that I don’t have or want a Mac based computer, my iOS development had screeched to an abrupt halt.

So, what will I do with WHS Mobile? For now, I will keep the current version available for download and support it whenever possible. Though, WHS Mobile will most likely not see any updates, or an edition for the next version of Windows Home Server.

That said, what do I plan on doing if not develop applications for iOS? I recently received a Windows Phone 7 device for my twenty-first birthday and have quite a few application ideas for it. Sadly, none of them include Windows Home Server. This is due to the already forseen demise the platform is facing and that I no longer use a Windows Home Server. I have switched to storing my data on an enterprise level OS called Windows Storage Server 2008 R2. This does not come with a Drive Extender equivalent but offers more storage options than Windows Home Server codenamed Vail.

What do I have in mind for Windows Phone 7? Well, I already have a remote control application that works similarly to Microsoft’s Remote Desktop application for Windows Mobile. I have two more applications in the making. One application streams your Media Browser movies and TV directly to a Windows Phone 7 device and the other is a Hyper-V management utility. This streaming converts your media on the fly and shows you the metadata that Media Browser provides. It really is like a portable copy of Media Browser. The Hyper-V application supports creating new, starting, stopping, pausing, and suspending virtual machines. In addition to, creating, listing, and deleting snapshots. It can also show a machine thumbnail, data about a selected virtual machine, and manage multiple Hyper-V servers at once. I believe the Hyper-V application would be helpful for those that have to manage a Hyper-V server in any environment.

So why else did I switch to Windows Phone 7 development?

For starters, Windows Phone is much easier to develop for and the time to production is much faster. It takes at least twice the amount of time to get work done with Objective-C (the programming language the iOS SDK uses). With Windows Phone, I can just use C#, a language I have been using for at least a few years. So I am far more familiar with the framework and language than I am with iPhone’s. This allows me to produce higher quality software faster and easier than I could with the iOS SDK.

I hope that this post fully explains why I have been AWOL in addition to the lack of news/updates on WHS Mobile or any of my other products.