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