MIX 10 Day 1: Windows Phone 7 Applications And How To

Microsoft kicked of MIX10 with Joe Belfiore talking about Windows Phone 7 Series and giving a quick run through of the phone. Today’s keynote was all about applications for the Windows Phone 7 Series and how to develop them. Microsoft demonstrated a few applications showcasing what the developers can do and announced tools that the developers would require to code the same. Microsoft has pulled off a genius move by allowing developers to use their existing knowledge about common technologies like .net and popular technologies like XNA and Silverlight to code applications for Windows Phone 7 Series devices, which I’ve written about in a previous post. Microsoft had recently showed how you can start a game on the desktop continue it on your phone and then finish it on the Xbox 360, the demo went to show that a lot of code for the game on the different platforms overlapped.

Today, Microsoft has released all necessary tools to begin development for Windows Phone 7 Series applications and the cool part is, all the tools are free. The package includes:

• CTP of Visual Studio 2010 Express
• Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator
• Silverlight
• XNA Game Studio

It’s a 290 MB download through a 3.2 MB installer – Download

Microsoft showcased some 3rd party developer apps as well that included:

Seesmic and Foursquare:

Trust me, this is the best Foursquare client you’ve seen yet. The iPhone app doesn’t even compare.

Associated Press client:

Subtle backgrounds for the type of news you’re reading.

3D Game – Harvest:

Other applications showed included a Comic Book reader app and the Netflix app amongst others. In one of the sessions after the keynote, Microsoft showed a LG and Samsung Windows Phone 7 Series device to the attendees. The basic specs (via Neowin) for a Windows Phone 7 Series device are:

• 3 hardware buttons – Start, Search, and Back
• Capacitive touch screen with 4 or more contact points
• Only two possible screen resolutions – 800×480 and 480×320
• A-GPS, Accelerometer, Compass, Light, Proximity
• 5 MP camera with flash and dedicated camera button
• Codec acceleration for multimedia
• 256MB RAM with 8GB flash for storage
• DirectX 9 accelerated GPU
• ARMv7 Cortex/Scorpion CPU

Video showing the LG and Samsung Windows Phone 7 Series devices:

According to information on twitter:

• A developer will get 70% of the cost of the app.
• The applications will have to be passed by Microsoft.

In a blog post on the team blog, Microsoft has put up details about the Windows Phone marketplace. The blog post loosely defines Microsoft’s guidelines for developers who want their applications to be featured in the marketplace:

• Always work well and reliably
• Do no harm
• Are legal and of generally good taste

Don’t miss these Related Posts:

• Windows Phone 7 Series Apps Based on XNA/Silverlight, No Backward Compatibility
• Details On Windows Phone: Windows Phone Starter, No WP7S Upgrade For HD2, WP7S LG Prototype
• Windows Phone 7 Series is now Official
• Windows Mobile Phone 7 Series Demo
• Zune Phone aka Microsoft Pink Coming At MWC

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