Artificial ignorance

A couple of weeks ago at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the world got to see what we’ve been working on with Windows Phone 7 Series. The end-user is at the center of our focus, and we’ve built our features and our platform offerings around how someone may want to use our phones. Those who got to see JoeB’s presentation or play with the devices walked away with the notion that our phones are wonderfully different. The next logical step now is for us to remove the covers of the developer platform, so that our developer community can start building applications that will complement the experiences on the phone.

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

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