eforms for the Road -- Visual Studio Magazine

eforms for the Road

Formotus Inc. creates SaaS solution for fast application deployment to mobile devices.

By Chris Kanaracus
04/01/2007

FormoPublish, a new Software as a Service (SaaS) product from Washington-based Formotus Inc., enables quick deployment of data-dependent apps to Windows mobile devices by marrying familiar technology with a proprietary republishing system.

Users create XML-based "eforms" with Microsoft Infopath, then upload them to Formotus' Web site. The company's proprietary technology then converts the files for use on Windows Smartphones and Pocket PCs. The applications can be deployed to handhelds and automatically adapt to varying screen sizes and operating systems.

Once deployed, the apps can be integrated with customers' back-end data systems. The solution works with all databases and carriers, according to the company.

CTO Adriana Neagu, a former Microsoft employee who co-created Infopath, declined to discuss the company's product roadmap in detail, though she
says that, being a SaaS provider, the company plans to frequently introduce updates.

She says Microsoft's recent Windows Mobile 6 platform release presents additional possibilities. "We're really excited about the new tools that are going to make it easier for our developers to ... squeeze the power from the underlying framework."

FormoPublish is available on a subscription basis for $35 per unit/user per month. An enterprise edition that can be installed behind a company's firewall for additional security is also available.

About the Author

Chris Kanaracus is the news editor for Redmond Developer News.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

VS Code v1.99 Is All About Copilot Chat AI, Including Agent Mode

Agent Mode provides an autonomous editing experience where Copilot plans and executes tasks to fulfill requests. It determines relevant files, applies code changes, suggests terminal commands, and iterates to resolve issues, all while keeping users in control to review and confirm actions.
Windows Community Toolkit v8.2 Adds Native AOT Support

Microsoft shipped Windows Community Toolkit v8.2, an incremental update to the open-source collection of helper functions and other resources designed to simplify the development of Windows applications. The main new feature is support for native ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation.
New 'Visual Studio Hub' 1-Stop-Shop for GitHub Copilot Resources, More

Unsurprisingly, GitHub Copilot resources are front-and-center in Microsoft's new Visual Studio Hub, a one-stop-shop for all things concerning your favorite IDE.
Mastering Blazor Authentication and Authorization

At the Visual Studio Live! @ Microsoft HQ developer conference set for August, Rockford Lhotka will explain the ins and outs of authentication across Blazor Server, WebAssembly, and .NET MAUI Hybrid apps, and show how to use identity and claims to customize application behavior through fine-grained authorization.
Linear Support Vector Regression from Scratch Using C# with Evolutionary Training

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the linear support vector regression (linear SVR) technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. A linear SVR model uses an unusual error/loss function and cannot be trained using standard simple techniques, and so evolutionary optimization training is used.