While this is a preview release it should give developers a chance to familiarise themselves with the technology and development suite. For consumers this, potentially, means a greater number of applications becoming available.
.NET Compact Framework is currently used to write many Windows Mobile applications. With the advent of Red Five Labs tools it will be possible to target both Windows Mobile and Symbian from a single codebase without any code changes.
From the Red Five Labs website:
Benefit of Using .NET on Symbian OS
The direct benefit to .NET developers is the ability to build mobile applications using the familiar .NET suite of software development technologies whilst targeting devices powered by the high performance mobile device operating system, Symbian OS.
Whilst it is possible for a mobile application developer to target Symbian OS devices using amongst others Java, Python, Ruby or Adobe Flash, the most powerful and likely language used is the Symbian C++ language.
Whilst Symbian C++ is powerful and fast, and arguably best suited for native application development, the language has a handful of characteristics that make it hard for software developers to easily create new mobile application. This difficulty results mostly from the design considerations catering for the particular requirements of mobile devices mentioned above. Such programmatic challenges include:
However, with the advent of Red Five Labs' .NET Compact Framework for S60, software developers can now write .NET applications targeting the Compact Framework and run these applications on S60 devices without the overhead of learning the subtleties of the Symbian OS.