Underneath Windows Phone 7 Series
I have been digging around for details on what the new Windows Phone 7 Series means for developers. Microsoft have done a great job to distance the new version from Windows Mobile 6.5. Talk of starting from scratch has caused many people to say some very nice things.
However, Charlie Kindel, who works on Windows Phone 7 Series, mentioned today that it’s still Windows CE underneath. This makes sense because, despite some uninformed opinion, CE has been a highly capable mobile OS for a very long time. And no, it wasn’t originally derived from Windows as people like to say. Windows CE was a completely new OS in 1992 and was subsequently worked on to make it more real-time. Microsoft has a huge investment in Windows CE and it wouldn’t make sense to throw it all away. Instead, they have, shall we say, added a veneer more suitable for today’s end users.
On multi-tasking third party applications, it seems like Windows Phone 7 Series might have taken a step backwards…
"but we have a few ways we’re going to make sure that third parties can bring their value to the user even when the app is not running"
It’s disappointing that there was no developer related WP7 news today. This is explained on Charlie’s blog…
"There’s a whole bunch of stuff we did not announce today. Specifically we did not announce anything about building applications & games for the new Windows Phone 7 Series operating system. We did this because (a) The new phone user experience we are talking about is so hugely cool we want people to be able to absorb it for a while, and… (b) We are working on being able to tell the full story in March at the MIX10 conference in Las Vegas. We have at least 12 sessions lined up and attendees will be the first to get access to the bits."
Interestingly, the MIX conference is all about web design… not native apps. Can we expect some kind of web-based programming interface (based on Silverlight?) on top of the OS?
Related Articles:
