Windows Phone 7 and developers

 

Today Microsoft reviled their new OS for phones called Windows 7 phone at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. There was a lot of rumors about it, how it will look like, what features will it have, when it’s available and so on. After this press conference, there are even more questions raised, at least for me. Let me just summarize a few key points of this new OS:

• It will be available at the end of this (2010) year
• It features completely new UI, with a lot of Zune look and functionalities
• The way we organized stuff is also much more efficient and nice
• It features Xbox Live, which means access to already very popular Xbox community
• Bing is also very nicely integrated
• Adobe Flash is not yet on device, but probably will be before launch – as Steve Balmer put it “we don’t have anything against it”

You can watch keynote (or newsroom) here, read a lot about it on Gizmodo, see a lot of pictures (and live coverage) on Engadget or see what are people twitting about it.
But that’s about it. No words about developer’s platform, any other third party applications etc. So, what can we developers expect? Where will we develop? How? So here are some basic information what I think will happen:

• We will develop using Visual Studio 2010 in C#, probably XNA and Silverlight – there are rumors, that this will be presented at MIX10 by Charlie Kindel and others
• We will sell apps strictly in Marketplace (this is not confirmed, yet not denied)
• Applications written for older Windows Mobile platforms will NOT work
• We have let’s say 6 months for creating new stuff, so at launch there will be plenty of apps
• It’s rumored, that you will not be able to develop in C++, C#/XNA will be exclusive

Let me just conclude with my though, that this was really necessary, since WM platform was already dying and Microsoft really needed to drastic move to survive on mobile platform. So decision to remove old apps support is one of the best, it is very similar to Palm’s move to WebOS from their old platform. And there will sooner or later be emulator for old applications, I’m pretty sure about that.
Disturbing is the rumor, that there will be no bypass from Marketplace, which can lead to another Apple AppStore like ridiculous rejections of completely legit applications. We will see about that.

I think Microsoft is back alive in mobile world. It’s a little bit early to compare it with competitors (Android, iPhone, Maemo, Palm), but it will surly be a bigger player than Palm. And for us, developers, that is a good thing.

author: Aleš Rosina | Comments: 0 | Tags: windows-mobile