The mobile framework is made available as a community technology preview (CTP) release and is freely downloadable from the company's website.

The technology on offer is a convergence of the power and ubiquity of the Symbian operating system and the ease of use of the .NET platform. The company is initially supporting the popular S60 user interface on which a wide range of devices are based; including the original Nokia "Series 60" devices, increasingly the multimedia N Series as well as the popular business E Series phones. With future support for the UIQ platform planned, a range of Sony Ericsson and Motorola devices will also be included.

Dušan Babich, CEO of Red Five Labs, believes the technology delivers significant value to the mobile developer community. "The market success of S60 based devices is a growing motivation for enterprise customers to adopt our framework which allows them to extend their .NET line-of-business applications to this mobile platform, without the need to rewrite or reinvest in the existing code base".

Red Five Labs’ .NET Compact Framework, which is based on open ECMA/ISO standards, has been engineered from the ground up to target Symbian OS. It is binary compatible with Microsoft's .NET Compact Framework (CF) 1.0 and initial tests indicate comparable performance.

“Internally we are very pleased with how our product is maturing towards version 1, and now we’re looking for external input to help us make sure we deliver a product that does exactly what our customers want it to do”, says CTO Mike Welham. "We’re looking forward to providing mobile C# and VB.NET developers with a similar level of device and operating system independence as that available to J2ME developers”.

Red Five Labs has received global interest in its initial private partner testing program and is now pleased to be able to engage the entire mobile software development ecosystem. The CTP release is backed by online support forums through which users of the software will be able to interact directly with the product development team. As part of the CTP release Red Five Labs welcomes all feedback and any suggestions on how to improve the software.

Red Five Labs in brief

Red Five Labs (Pty) Ltd is a venture capital backed startup preparing to go to market with their .NET Compact Framework implementation for the Symbian OS, enabling independent software vendors, enterprise customers, smartphone manufacturers and network operators to leverage the power of mobile .NET on Symbian devices. The company is based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Further information: www.redfivelabs.com