Events

The second day’s keynote was THE keynote that we expected. Today, the main topic was Windows Phone 7 codename “Mango”, the very expected update for the mobile operating system of Microsoft which will be available on October 10. And now we know why it is so expected: it will bring the phone to a new level, with a lot of very interesting features. The two other topics were Silverlight 5 and Kinect (make sure you look at the last link of this post below).

The phone will now fully support Silverlight 4.

New API’s to access phone resources. Developers will now have access to the contacts and the calendar, and also be able to launch the Bing maps application. There will also be more possibilities to use the device’s sensors with the help of a framework that will ease the usage of those sensors.

The multitasking will give the possibility to fast switch between applications and will now be available for third party applications, which means that developers will have new API’s at their disposal to:

• Access the phone services like the alarms, the reminders, the background music stream or the possibility to transfer data using a queue mechanism that will persist even if the phone is switched off.
• Use background agents to perform background processing that does not require the UI.

A local SQL CE database will also be available on the phone to support data intensive applications. This local database will support Linq queries.

It will now also be possible to use Sockets to introduce TCP/UDP based communications. Developers are not limited anymore to http requests. The demo demonstrated an IRC application on the phone, and the arrival of Skype on the phone was announced.

More possibilities with the usage of Tiles and Push notifications, with for example the possibility to use both sides of the tile, deep linking from the tile to a specific task of an application, multi-tiles per application, the local access from an application to the tile API…

It will now be possible to mix Silvelight and XNA in one application, bringing the whole bunch of Silverlight controls to the game world, and the 3D capabilities of XNA to Silverlight apps.

IE9 will be fully integrated in the phone, with support of HTML 5, geolocation in the browser and the exact same engine than on the pc, which means that the html markup will not have to be adapted to work on the device (except if we want the website to appear in another way of course).

Scott Guthrie also announced some new tooling for the phone development, like an accelerometer and GPS emulator embedded in the current phone emulator, and also an advanced profiling tool which will help developers fine-tune their application for performance.

This new release of Silverlight will be available in October. The keynote focused on the new hardware decoding media capabilities of the platform and the introduction of the XNA API to Silverlight, with two great demo’s. The first one is the website that will replace this one in the future: http://www.blueangels.navy.mil, and which will use a lot of embedded videos. A great demonstration of hardware decoding capabilities in Silverlight.

The second demo was an 3D House Builder application which showed us the integration of XNA’s 3D capabilities within Silverlight. The demo will come as open source software along with the beta release of Silverlight 5.

The Kinect for Windows SDK is now available in beta here: http://research.microsoft.com/kinectsdk, and will be released in May. To demonstrate the use of this SDK, we got 4 great demo’s. It is quite difficult to express the magic of all these demo’s with words. Fortunately, they are already available on channel 9 here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/C9Team/Kinect-Demos-with-the-Channel-9-team.

Enjoy !