Mobile PCs and Tablet PCs are a growing market segment and are of the utmost strategic importance to Microsoft. New developments in hardware, software, developer tools, and SDKs give developers many new opportunities.

Digital Ink is only a collection of lines rendered on the screen, but with Ink recognition and analysis, you can turn it into meaningful information such as text, drawings, gestures, commands, and even the relationship between two shapes. The Tablet PC SDK makes it surprisingly simple to detect all these types of information in Digital Ink.

The Real Time Stylus API provides an alternate way to receive pen input pen. This high performance API provides a great level of control to developers for a small penalty in added effort.

Software can have a huge effect on the life span of a battery; scaling down functionality is an easy way to drastically increase the lifetime of mobile PC battery. Do your users a favor and find out how to optimize your applications' power requirements.

Modern applications require more sophisticated data access features than a simple connection to SQL Server. Data needs to be available in distributed scenarios as well as offline scenarios. This article provides an architectural overview and implementation examples that support these scenarios.

The sometimes-connected nature of mobile computers means that you need to build software that works smoothly as networks connect and disconnect. This article shows you how to build network-aware software using the Network Location Awareness APIs.

One of the more interesting and challenging places to use Ink is in Web applications. But how can this technology, which is dependent on the physical relationship between the stylus, the digitizer, and the operating system, work over the Internet?

Windows SideShow, an auxiliary hardware display, gives users the ability to use PCs even when they are turned off—and developers get to provide the content.

Unless your battery is really, really good, you'll eventually want to store your Ink. Simple file storage or XML serialization is sometimes sufficient, but usually, you'll want to move Ink into and out of a relational database. Here's how.

In addition to text recognition and similar capabilities, Ink can also be useful for image annotation and markup, such as in medical and insurance applications, where marking up images can be a valuable and critical form of input.