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Don't worry: the code will always tell you what to do. Just listen.

The key points here are that a class is only a singleton if all applications treat it exactly the same and if its clients can use the class without an application context.

"[c]ode wants to be simple."

We need to get rid of these gratuitous dependencies.  Merely papering over them with a transaction—making them “safe”—doesn’t do anything to improve the natural parallelism that a program contains.  It just ensures it doesn’t crash.  Sure, that’s plenty important, but providing programming models and patterns to eliminate the gratuitous dependencies also achieves the goal of not crashing but with the added benefit of actually improving scalability too.  Transactions have worked so well in enabling automatic parallelism in databases because the basic model itself (without transactions) already implies natural isolation among queries.  Transactions break down and scalability suffers for programs that aren’t architected in this way.  We should learn from the experience of the database community in this regard

There will always be hidden mutation of shared state inside lower level system components.  These are often called “benevolent side-effects,” thanks to Hoare, and apply to things like lazy initialization and memorization caches.  These will be done by concurrency ninjas who understand locks.  And their effects will be isolated by convention.

Even with all of this support, we’d be left with an ecosystem of libraries like the .NET Framework itself which have been built atop a fundamentally mutable and imperative system.  The path forward here is less clear to me, although having the ability to retain a mutable model within pockets of guaranteed isolation certainly makes me think the libraries are salvageable.  Thankfully, the shift will likely be very gradual, and the pieces that pose substantial problems can be rewritten in place incrementally over time.  But we need the fundamental language and type system support first.

Focus on the whole experience, meaning you need to be inclusive of display sizes, input methods, and form factors when you design and develop your applications and services.

.Net CF

expanding this functionality with QT libraries, Adobe AIR technology

StyleTap has a Palm emulator that allows you to run thousands of Palm applications on Symbian products

Red Five Labs has a runtime for Symbian OS which ensures Microsoft .net applications can be fully supported.

many people around the world are not buying and cannot afford a PC.

The Symbian Foundation is helping to do this by ensuring we lower the barrier for entry for software developers.