Seminars

Future of Software Engineering on Mobile Devices

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Nikolai Tillmann

Abstract

The world is experiencing a technology shift. In 2012, more touchscreen-based mobile devices like smartphones and tablets will be sold than desktops, laptops, and netbooks combined. In fact, in many cases powerful and easy-to-use smart phones are going to be the first and, especially in developing countries, possibly the only computing devices which virtually all people will own and carry with them at all times. Mobile devices do not only have touchscreens, but they are also equipped with a multitude of sensors, such as GPS, cameras, accelerometer, and they are often connected to the cloud. Is it possible to develop new software directly on mobile devices, without using a PC? How could a user interface for such a new development model look like? We will present a new tool from Microsoft Research, TouchDevelop, that tries to address these questions. TouchDevelop is an application creation environment that runs on the smartphone itself, no separate PC required. Its programming language and code editor have been built from scratch around the idea that all code is entered via a touchscreen, without a keyboard. We will report on how TouchDevelop is being used in practice by thousands of people.

Speaker Biography

Nikolai Tillmann's main areas of research are program authoring on mobile devices, program analysis, testing, code optimization, and verification. He leads the Pex project, a framework for runtime verification and automatic test case generation for .NET applications based on parameterized unit testing and dynamic symbolic execution. He is also involved in the Spur project, where he is working on a tracing Just-In-Time compiler for .NET and JavaScript code. Most recently, he started the TouchDevelop project which enables writing of programs for mobile devices on mobile devices.