Today I'm attending Microsoft's Windows Phone Developer Day in Helsinki. Should be interesting, I haven't done much WP development. And it's nice to see something about the Mango. Naturally the Mango part is the last so that people won't just come to see that and leave. But who would do that anyway...
650 people were allowed to attend and they're saying it's going to be packed. There are already lots of people here, more still pouring in...
Keynote speaker is Brandon Watson, the rest of the day is hosted by Jaime Rodriquez. Sessions include Designing for Windows Phone, Introduction to Silverlight and Tools, Application Development for Windows Phone, Integrating with Windows Phone Hardware and the Services, What's new in Mango.
Brandon's Keynote
I'll write stuff about Brandon's keynote here, other sessions are probably handled in other posts if there's interesting stuff to talk about.
He says that this is the first WP Dev conf after the announcement of Mango. So they really seem to care about Finland ;)
In 7 months Microsoft has gotten 1.6 million tools downloads, 18k apps in WP7 Marketplace, 42k registered developers... Not bad, really.
Oh, and people can really stop complaining: multitasking, raw camera access, socket access etc are in Mango. So don't worry. Also Brandon said that apps can continue to work in the background. So maybe the multitasking will be more than just saving the app state, as it mostly is in iPhone.
Bing and Things
Nice! If you search for example a movie, you'll get a product card with information about the movie. You can find information, schedules etc. But the most interesting thing is App Connect. There is a pane where you have direct links to applications that have informed the phone that they can handle e.g. movie cards. The user has a direct link to the application. Not seen anywhere else, guys.
Oh, what about if your app can handle it but is not installed? No worries, it is still shown in the list! So people can install your app directly from search if it looks like an interesting app for e.g. movies. This is cool!
Distribution
There is also a beta distribution option, 100 users, app has to be free, no update etc. Private distribution serves also paid apps, but the app is not publicly visible in the marketplace. And then there's the public marketplace. This is also a very good enhancement.
App Hub
New dashboard, W-8 forms, clear notifications etc. If your app is rejected, you get a clear PDF report stating what the problems were. This is one thing that could be a lot better than Apple's. I've gotten stupid short messages from them and twice they've even said "the app just doesn't work" while it clearly works and on a resubmit they suddenly fot it to work. This should not happen, ever!
Web and IE9
There is background audio available. And it's also available with web browser! You can have an HTML5 app that plays music, you can put it into background, lock the phone, the phone play/pause keys work with it etc etc. Nice!
CSS transformations shown, 23 FPS. GPU is used in browser too.
Boston.com loading. Flash logo shown, but they naturally support HTML5 and videos can be watched without Flash bloat. The web browser seems fast and very smooth, even with a big page like this.
Naturally the browser supports geolocation.
Oh, all this was shown on an actual device via camera, no emulators or other stuff.
XNA + Silverlight
Previously with XNA you couldn't make UIs easily. You couldn't use Silverlight on XNA or XNA on Silverlight. Now you can. You can overlay Silverlight on XNA and make UIs that control the XNA game. This will make localization so much easier since you don't have to have lots of resources for different languages.
Also, you can have controls on top of camera feed with raw camera access.
Sensors
You have raw access to compass and gyro. There is a lot of math done for us so you don't have to care about true north/magnetic north etc. It's done for you. I'm not sure if it's a problem with other platforms, haven't used the compasses.
Sockets, Database etc
No surprise here. Most requested features: sockets and local database access. They're here. As requested. You're welcome.
You have access to contacts and calendar, you have directions selector... With single lines of code.
Multitasking
Fast app resume is there, as with iPhone etc. But what about real multitasking? There are background tasks that allow the app to use some time to do their stuff. At the moment it's about 15 seconds that the app is allowed at a time. It's also inferred that the apps can continue running in the background even after reboot. This would be very nice indeed!
Live tiles updating, battery friendly scheduler, background alerts. You can have multiple tiles for one app that go into different parts of the application.
I hope the live tiles are really battery friendly (Brandon says they really are), at least with Symbian they seem to be really power hungry.
Live Agents
You can pin a part of the application into the home screen. A demo is shown that shows a store selling hardware. You pin an Xbox product info to the main screen, it'll show you e.g. how far you're from the nearest retailer. Click on it and you'll get to the product info in the app. Not the main screen.
Dev Tools
Beta tools available now. Are beta quality, but you can build real apps with them. You can target Windows Phone 7.0 or 7.1 (numbers might change, the latter anyway being Mango).
Demo about a simple app that shows an image that has a PlaneProjection. Reference to sensors API. Create an Accelerometer. Add a delegate. Start the accelerometer. In the delegate change the plane projection with the values gotten from the accel. And the image rotates with the phone. Simple.
Oh, and in the devtools you can now simulate sensor data, especially the accelerometer. You can create XML data for the motions and load them etc. Easy testing with this, for sure!
Naturally you can also simulate GPS data. When will Apple bother to make this possible? With (at least) Qt it's possible on Symbian too.
Q&A
There is no ambiguity here: every single handset that has WP7 will have Mango available to it. Free of charge.
No Silverlight support in the browser itself at the moment.
Any new stuff in the enterprise management etc? There are some announcements from TechEd, but the enterprise stuff probably isn't as great as it should be, but things are getting better.
Full forward compatibility from 7.0 to Mango. No breaking things.
What about NFC? It's not available now. It's requested, but nothing for Mango. Maybe later.
When will the integration with Ovi Maps/Store etc coming? When the first Nokia phone comes out.
Can you sell apps outside the marketplace? No. Certified app marketplace is important. They are figuring out how to allow for homebrew stuff, but there are security problems. I understand this, but I do want some kind of homebrew stuff to be possible.
When will devs get Mango devices? If you are a developer with a device from Microsoft, it'll come some time in the future. If you buy a WP7 device now, there is no clear release date right now.
Who will have the first Mango devicea available? Anyone who happens to be the first.
Custom shaders in XNA? Much requested, a challenge with the programming model. Looking hard to enable it, but not available right now.
Ruggedized devices running WP7? No information about those, handset maker stuff.
What are the restrictions for developers? There are guidelines, you can download them from the marketplace site.
Operator billing is supported and with Nokia it's even better. People are five times more likely to buy when they have operator billing.
No native code support. None. Sorry. C# is to be used. "That's sad" Brandon: "It's not sad, it's horrible!" So yes, Microsoft would also like to have it, but it'll take time and they do have deadlines.