Last night, I received an email from my boss who’s in our head office in Europe regarding my new and not so new tasks based on his discussions with the management team from there.
Basically, I would continue to provide technical support to our local client which I had actually been working with for more than 3 years now. There are still a couple of issues that needs to be resolved but it would be of less priority since the system is quite stable for now.
I also received a couple of documentation tasks regarding the IMPS (Instant Messaging and Presence Server) Clients (both downloadable and embedded) available in the market today. I’ve started workin on this in the past few weeks but there are a couple of functionalities that I still need to test, such as GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) traffic count for each client as well as PEP (Presence Enchanced Phonebook) compliance.
The most exciting task I received was developing a Symbian based IMPS client. Yippeee! 
I must admit that I am new to Symbian development as well as C++ so this would require quite some amount of effort to be able to start things up. Most of my life as a programmer was spent developing applications (both server side and client side) using Java, XML, HTML, xHTML, WML, etc., and just lately, ventured into J2ME/MIDP development. I have basic C programming skills that might be useful, but I haven’t been using it for quite some time except for debugging linux applications in our servers for compilation errors as well as patches for customization, but a complete development cycle in C was out of the picture for quite some time now.
As a starting point, I downloaded and installed Metrowerks CodeWarrior for Symbian Personal Edition version 2.8.3 from the Nokia Forum website. Version 3.0 of the said IDE is actually available but the trial license is only valid for 15 days so I went for version 2.8 which has a 90-day evaluation license; long enough for me to learn Symbian C++ development.
Right now, I’m very much eager to learn this new programming language and most of all, another competence that would add up to my profile, is pretty cool! 
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September 20th, 2005 at 8:37 pm
So, let me see if I understand this correctly:
You’re new to Symbian AND C++ and were given the task to create an IMPS client?
I hope they budgeted around 15 years for you to complete this…
September 21st, 2005 at 6:28 am
Well, it’s a team project and some of my team members already have some competence on Symbian development so I have some people to work with and learn from.
15 years might be too long, I think it’s just a matter of interest and eagerness to learn. Besides, as a programmer, I don’t think learning a new language would be that hard.