VSLive Mystery surrounds the fate of AppForge, the mobile applications developer, with suggestions the company may have ceased trading.

AppForge, whose partner list reads like a Who's Who in mobile platforms and devices, is thought to have gone out of business on March 15. Questions over AppForge's future surfaced today as partner Microsoft hosted its annual VSLive developer conference in San Francisco, California.

At least one rival has started to exploit the uncertainty. SatelliteForms.net, a Palm and PocketPC rapid application specialist, is flagging its products as an alternative while offering AppForge customers' a "special transition incentive."

AppForge is famed for its Crossfire plug in to Microsoft's Visual Studio integrated development environment and Crossfire client for Blackberry, Palm, Windows PocketPC and Smartphone, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola devices.

The company promised to help developers and organizations re-use existing IT infrastructure, meaning Visual Studio, saving time and achieving good return on investment when putting consumer and enterprise applications on mobile devices.®

Related stories

• Oracle scoops up AppForge assets (19 April 2007)
• Analysis Microsoft shows its hand to stay in the mobile web war (6 April 2007)
• PalmSource looks beyond the phone to tablets, players and tools (12 February 2004)
• Nokia prefers Python to Perl for smartphone scripting (21 January 2004)
• Palm, Symbian and Windows apps to spread from Visual Basic source (24 September 2003)
• 3GSM Symbian takes charge at Symbian (28 February 2003)
• Palm courts Pocket PC users in enterprise tools push (3 April 2002)