Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Windows Phone Marketplace Developer Newsletter - April 2011

Just received an email from Microsoft regarding the status of the WP7 marketplace.  I won't bore you with the gory details but here are some interesting bits for us wp7 users.


For the Consumers:
"New Windows Phone dev tools for the next version of Windows Phone is coming in May"

  • Couple months before Nodo was released (slowly), the development community received a dev kit upgrade as well.  
  • Definitely a precursor to "Mango" as it goes on to mention a lot of juice bits
"The next version of Windows Phone will be available to consumers later this year and with introduce many features"
  • Multitasking
  • IE9
  • HTML5
  • real time communication and messaging (i.e. Whatsapp, skype, etc, etc as socket support will be enabled)
  • Twitter Integration with the People Hub
  • Broader connectivity to skydrive
Windows Phone Marketplace will increase from 16 to 35 countries.  List of countries are: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, India, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden and Taiwan. 

For us nerds:
  • The new Developer Tools will allow you to write apps that make full use of multitasking via fast application switching and background agents
  • Over 1,500 new APIs and the support of Silverlight 4
  • Access to new sensors (I read this as a new gen WP7 phone with freakin' lasers and heat seeking missles)
  • on-device SQL CE database
  • Access to phone contacts (I know you can now through the API but it's very sucky) - which also really means that apps like Skype, Whatsapp, Viber could be on their way
  • Access to calendar stores
  • socket support
  • XNA/Silverlight Integration
  • Improve Push Notification and Live Tile experience
  • New emulator with support for accelerometer and GPS location data

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