A few things you need to be aware of with the new tools and code for Push Notifications in WP7:

1. In your WP7 application’s WMAppManifest.xml file, ensure you have listed out the capabilities that your application will be utilizing. In this case, for your application to support Push Notifications, at the least you’d need to add the following to your WMAppManifest.xml:

<Capabilities>
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_NETWORKING" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_PUSH_NOTIFICATION" />
</Capabilities>

2. Your application needs to have an entry for the publisher. Perform the following steps since the default entry for Publisher is empty by default (changes in bold and red):

   <App xmlns="" ProductID="{5286c8f1-e346-4a8b-a0c9-1b37aa9bdc9d}" Title="PushTest" RuntimeType="SilverLight"
   
   Version="1.0.0.0" Genre="NormalApp"  Author="ai" Description="pushtest" Publisher="ai">

3. There are a couple of changes in the actual payload that gets sent. Inside the application that actually posts the notification (through Microsoft’s push notification server) to Windows Phone 7, the payload now needs to look like (changes in bold and red):

   string toastMessage = "Content-Type: text/xml\r\nX-WindowsPhone-Target: toast\r\n\r\n" +
   
   "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>" +

   "<wp:Notification xmlns:wp=\"WPNotification\">" +

   "<wp:Toast>" +

   "<wp:Text1><string></wp:Text1>" +

   "</wp:Toast>" + "</wp:Notification>";

   I’ve used an example payload for a Toast Notification above, but similar changes apply for other types of notifications.

That’s it! I’ve tested this with the ‘Push Tweets’ sample app:

Related articles:

1. Changes in the April release of the Windows Phone 7 developer tools
2. MSDN: Send a Push Notification for Windows Phone 7
3. Push tweets to a Windows Phone 7 device (via push notifications)
4. Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh

@ai

Developers want to

• create applications easily,
• be able to get to market quickly, and,
• have a clear path for distribution and/or monetization.

We used these as our guiding principles as we set off to build the platform.

The Developer Platform is (also) different

On Windows Phone 7 Series, the primary development platforms will comprise exclusively of Silverlight and XNA.

Silverlight

Since it was first announced back in 2007 as a cross-browser cross-platform browse plugin, Silverlight has  become one of the most widely accepted and acclaimed developer platforms. For the first time through XAML, the primary markup language that powers the design for Silverlight applications, we were able to  provide a great story for designers and developers to work together better. We want to be able to bring that power of Silverlight to our phones.

XNA

The number of people playing games on their phones has doubled in recent years. Naturally, we wanted to enable our  developers to build the best of breed, performant 2D and 3D games to target our phones. Using the XNA Framework, developers can create high performing games and target Windows Phone 7 Series.

Multiple “Screens”

With Silverlight and XNA, we’re on course to enable the best scenarios across multiple screens with the consistency of platform. Silverlight helps power applications on PCs (through the browser and out of the browser) as well as Windows Phone 7 Series. XNA helps power applications on the Zune, XBox as well as Windows Phone 7 Series.

A New Beginning

The inclusion of these platforms on the phone introduces a new beginning to our developer community. We’ve heard time and again from developers who’ve wanted to create rich applications for Windows Phones but have been limited by the capabilities of our platform. The challenges our developer community faced with the multitude of devices and the varying specifications of these devices also posed problems. And so, change was imminent.

There are definitely more pieces to the platform, like the tools, or the specific feature set that will be exposed via our APIs, or the Marketplace. We’ll be discussing all of these in much more detail at MIX.

You can read more over on Charlie’s blog – Different Means Better with the new Windows Phone Developer Experience

Be sure to follow our developer team @wp7dev, or individually, Charlie Kindel (@ckindel), Shawn Hargreaves (@shawnhargreaves) , Michael Klucher (@kluch), Andre Vrignaud (@ozymandias), Loke Uei Tan (@lokeuei), Christian Schormann (@cschormann). I hope to see you at MIX!

@ai

It’s been so very interesting to read all the press leading up to today. Some speculation, some hype, some rumor. Today, we’re announcing Windows Phone 7 Series – a different kind of phone operating system.

The genesis

The Windows Phone 7 Series was built fundamentally with the end-user, the consumer, in mind. The Windows Phone team is committed to building an operating system, which handset manufacturers integrate, and carriers sell to end-users. In the past, somewhere along the way, it may have appeared that our immediate end-users were the handset manufacturers – our end-user is the consumer. While we still want to enable innovation in the hardware space, we also want end-users to benefit from a consistent and brilliant software experience from the phone.

The creative mastermind behind most if not all aspects of this experience is Joe Belfiore, a name you may recognize as the lead of the Zune.

Given said, here are 7 things about Windows Phone 7 Series that excite me the most. Narrowing this list down to just 7 was extremely hard, that said, there’s more of where this came from.

Seven

1. Design

   The Windows Phone 7 User Experience is different from what you may have experienced before, not just with Windows (Mobile) Phones 6.X, but others. Bottom-line – the experience is intuitive – whether you are navigating on the phone, taking pictures, sending and receiving mail, looking up a person to see their latest Facebook status or trying to purchase an application, things just plain work in an intuitive fashion.
   Today, with the majority of the phones out there, all you see are pages of icons. Every now and then I find myself staring at an icon for a few seconds before I associate the icon with an application. The icon is useful to me, but not as much as the name of the application I’m about to launch. That said, the User Interface in Windows Phone 7, as JoeB likes to say, is predominantly typographical. You’ll find clear and concise text in several menus, like signs at airports or terminals that are meant to help you get to your destination quickly and easily.
   The Start experience is one that we’ve always believed is invaluable. At a glance, you want to get vital information. If you need to perform involved tasks, you may want to launch an application. The Live Tiles feature is meant for just that. More importantly, end-users can add and remove tiles to the start screen.

2. Consistency

   The experiences I’ve described above are meant to be consistent – when a user picks up a Windows Phone 7 Series device, any Windows Phone 7 Series device, the interface the user will get to experience will be the same.
   While the software experience will be consistent, users also have growing expectations of hardware, and rightfully so. We’ve set forth on defining a base Hardware Design for phones running the Windows Phone 7 Operating System – the devices will have 3 buttons along the bottom of the phone – one for going back (to whatever you were doing last), one for getting back to the Start screen, and one for Search (more on Search below). There are several consistent hardware features you will see in Windows Phone 7 devices, such as a 3.5mm headphone jack, a minimum of 5 megapixel camera, sensors like an Accelerometer or A-GPS, 480×800 resolution, capacitive dual symmetric multi-touch screens, etc.

3. Pervasive Search

   The name says it all – one click of the button on the bottom far right, and you are taken to Bing, to search locally on the device or search on the web, with the option of searching for items that are contextually location aware.

4. People are more than just contacts

   I use the ‘contacts’ feature on my phone today to call, text or email someone. This information about my contacts primarily comes from our Exchange server. While contacting a person is key, today that’s just not enough – I want to know what pictures have they recently posted, what are they currently doing, or what does this person look like today? While I prefer text to icons with applications, I prefer photographs to names of people when I’m looking someone up.
   That said, the integration with Facebook and Windows Live lets a user ‘pivot’ on a person on your phone – you’re not just looking up a contact, you’re learning more about them by associating with the social networks they might be on. I don’t need to launch a specific app just to learn about my sister’s latest Facebook status update, for example.  

5. Marketplace++

   We all know that the notion of an on-deck Marketplace where users can discover applications, games and music is paramount both for users and the developer community. The Marketplace experience, everything from what you see on the device to the portal that developers get to use to submit applications, has received major facelifts. As much as I’d like to, I can’t dive into too much detail just yet, but the experience will want users to keep using the Marketplace.

6. XBox Live Integration

   Game changing – no pun intended. From what we’ve heard, this is a dream come true for XBox gamers.

7. Zune Integration

   The reviews for the ZuneHD have been amazing. The experience that the Zune player provides is nearly unparalleled and it is fully integrated into the phone. Your music and videos go with you on your phone.

If you haven’t already, have a go at this Channel 9 Video with JoeB demoing the experience:

Developer Platform

The developer platform on Windows Phone 7 Series deserves its own section and mention. This is the team that Charlie Kindel (@ckindel) leads, and Loke (@lokeuei) and I amongst others work on. We have so much to share about this topic, that we thought it deserved its own conference, really. So, come to MIX, and hear the likes of Charlie, Scott Guthrie, Loke and others talk about the application platform. Let me wrap this up by saying, based on what you’ve seen and heard, you’ll want to develop for this platform. Watch ’#wp7dev’ or follow ‘@wp7dev’ and ‘@ckindel’  for more.

Excited?

I hope the Windows Phone 7 Series excites you as much as it does us. We’re hoping to provide more details about the application platform soon enough so that you can start developing.

I hope to see you at MIX!

In the meanwhile, here are blog posts from fellow Windows Phone 7 Series team members:

• Hello from Seattle (@ckindel)
• Predicting the Future (@shawnhargreaves)
• Multiple Screens is the New Main Screen (@gameozymandias)
• Windows Phone 7 Series – Show and Tell

@ai

now playing in my head: “Stronger”, Kanye West

Prerequisites

The app is only available for touch screen Windows phones today. The .NET Compact Framework v3.5 is a pre-requisite for you to be able to run the application on the phone. You’d also need a phone that runs either Windows Mobile 6.1 or a Windows Mobile 6.5.

Get me them goods

You can get the goods by emailing admin@touchality.com or submitting your email address in this webform: http://touchality.com/WinMoSquare/

Futures

This is a beta. We definitely want to add features to expose the leaderboard, add new friends on the fly, and incorporate any new APIs that Foursquare may expose. There are also plans to submit this application to the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, and that will happen as soon as we hit v1 of the app and we’re confident that we’re beyond a beta.

Demo

Here I’ve installed WinMoSquare on an HTC HD2. I’ll let the screen captures do the talking as far as the functionality of the app itself goes:

Last but not least, I want to thank the team at Touchality for developing the app. Foursquare away!

ai

PS: And thanks to @kylemce for the name “WinMoSquare” :)

Mobile partners from around the globe are committed to updating or expanding their portfolios to include phones with Windows Mobile 6.5.

• In North America: Mobile operators AT&T, Bell Mobility, Sprint, TELUS and Verizon Wireless, and phone manufacturers HP, HTC Corp., LG Electronics, Samsung and Toshiba Corp.
• In Europe: Mobile operators Orange, Deutsche Telekom AG and Vodafone Group Plc, and phone manufacturers Acer, HTC, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba
• In Latin America: Mobile operator TIM Brazil, and phone manufacturers HTC, LG Electronics and Samsung
• In Asia Pacific: Mobile operators NTT DoCoMo Inc., SoftBank Mobile Corp., SK Telecom, Telstra and WILLCOM Inc., and phone manufacturers Acer Inc., HTC, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba

What’s new in 6.5?

• Consumer oriented features – A Windows phone lets you get your work done and still have fun, wherever you are. We have been working on making Windows Phones more consumer friendly while retaining our strong enterprise focused applications, such as Outlook, Word, etc.
• Stay connected – Connect to powerful online services so the information, contacts and apps you need are always at your fingertips.
• Better UI, Better UX
  • A new home screen with customizable widgets that display glance-able updates, such as news, weather, traffic and more, from your favorite Web services.
  • An improved user interface focused on finger touch and the ability to cut through clutter to accomplish what you want. Windows phones enable a number of gestures that take advantage of the new physics engine to make it fun and easy to use the phone with your finger. Windows phones support resistive touch, which can be operated with one hand and uses pressure to activate the touch feature.

Lock Screen


Today screen

Programs Menu

• New Browser – Internet Explorer Mobile, a powerful new browser where websites will look the same on your phone as they do on the PC so it’s easy to check in for a flight, get directions or pay a bill from wherever you are. Internet Explorer Mobile is built on the same technologies as its desktop counterpart, Internet Explorer, and brings the mobile browsing experiences on par with what people expect from their desktop computers.
  • High quality mobile browsing – Using the Internet Explorer rendering engine, Internet Explorer Mobile displays Web pages on the phone in the same quality as on the desktop, allowing consumers to experience their content in the layout they enjoy. Panning and zooming capabilities, as well as mouse navigation for non-touch phones, helps people easily find and enjoy what they are looking for while browsing the Web.
  • Rich media experiences – Internet Explorer Mobile will support the rich experiences that many Web pages are built on, such as Adobe Flash. This will enable people to view Flash-based video content, like YouTube, at the same level of quality as if they were using their desktop computers.
  • Desktop consistent AJAX support - Through the support of Jscript version 5.7 in Internet Explorer Mobile, developers will now be able to deliver desktop-consistent AJAX Web experiences up to date to that of Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Mobile devices.
  • Best-in-class mobile Web transactions – With the newest experiences in Internet Explorer Mobile, Microsoft brings the mobile Web browsing experience on par with what people have come to expect from their desktops – the ability to easily view Web pages and multimedia on the Web and complete transactions, from banking to Facebook updates.

Internet Explorer rendering http://bing.com

Internet Explorer rendering http://united.com

• Sync your on-device data – My Phone, a free service, which provides Web sync of valuable data from the phone, like pictures, music and texts, to a Web portal for safe keeping and sharing.
• Download and install apps easily – Windows Marketplace for Mobile, a new, rich application marketplace available on Windows phones which allow people to easily find, install and experience the applications you want

Which phones are upgradeable to 6.5?

Some current Windows Mobile 6.1 phones will be updateable to Windows Mobile 6.5 if they meet hardware requirements. Ultimately, it’s our partners’ decision whether their phones will support the upgrade.

The Samsung Jack with AT&T, the HTC Diamond 2, the HTC Touch Pro 2, and LG phones Eigen and HQ, along with four new Windows Mobile 6.5 devices from Acer have announced to offer Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrades.

Why “Windows phone”?

As we move into the consumer space, we need to adjust our language to be more approachable and friendly. Windows phone fits naturally into consumer language and users can easily relate given the popularity of the Windows brand.

When will My Phone be available?

My Phone is available today for all users of Windows Mobile 6.0 or 6.1 phones will and can be downloaded at http://sn1-p1.myphone.microsoft.com/. My Phone will be available on Windows phones beginning on October 6, 2009.

My Phone Sync Screen


My Phone Syncing

What is Windows Marketplace for Mobile?

A rich and integrated marketplace for searching, browsing and purchasing mobile applications from Windows phones based on Windows Mobile 6.5, or from a PC, by simply using a Windows Live ID. For developers, the marketplace presents yet another opportunity to generate revenue by selling applications, but now with direct access to millions of Windows phone users. For mobile operators, it provides opportunity to increase data plan attach rates and generate a new revenue stream from application sales.

ISVs and developers will set their own price for applications, some will be available for free. We’re doing all we can to help generate revenue for ISVs and developers to encourage innovation and attract shoppers by delivering strong value and a great experience. Our model will encourage developers to sell their applications at a price that reflects their true value to customers.

What is the Race to Market challenge?

When you submit your mobile app to the Windows Marketplace, you’ll be eligible to win the Race to Market Challenge and exciting prizes. The Race to Market Challenge will reward the developer whose paid application earns the most revenue within the contest period and the developer whose free application is downloaded the most within the contest period. Winners will receive a prize package including a Microsoft Surface table and developer kit, free online marketing and promotion of their application, plus a one-of-a-kind trophy. Visit http://www.mobilethisdeveloper.com/ for more details.

Stay connected

• Twitter – @wmdev
• Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/wmdev
• Our website – http://developer.windowsmobile.com
• The Windows Phone Blog – http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/default.aspx
• You can also meet members of the Windows phone team in person at these events:
  • Mobilize on 9/10 in San Francisco, CA
  • TechCrunch50 on 9/13 and 9/14 in San Francisco, CA
  • CTIA Wireless on 10/7-10/9 in San Diego, CA

“ai”

Update: Here is Stephanie Ferguson’s launch announcement post: Windows phones are Coming on October 6th! and our PressPass announcement : Microsoft to Deliver New Generation of Windows Phones on Oct. 6