Some time back the team and I talked about our commitment to the Silverlight and XNA platforms on Windows Phone 7 Series as the primary developer platforms. We also promised to go into more detail about these platforms at MIX.
Not to oversimplify things, but, you can think about creating an application using the following iterative process:
While I can’t help you a whole lot with the ideation, I want to drill into a little more detail about how you can Design, Develop and Test your app, and eventually Distribute and Monetize your Windows Phone 7 app. The easiest way to think about how to design and develop for Windows Phone 7 Series is to break it down in to the platform piece and the tools piece.
The Platform
Silverlight and XNA
As we’d mentioned earlier, the primary development platforms will comprise exclusively of Silverlight and XNA. The Silverlight platform will be a superset of Silverlight 3 with some specific APIs and features that cater to the phone. The .NET Compact Framework, as we know it today, will not be exposed in Windows Phone 7 Series.
Location and Push Notification Services
The need to get a device user’s current pinpoint location has become increasingly important to mobile application developers. We’ll be exposing APIs for developers to get a user’s current location. The API in turn will use a variety of techniques, including GPS, Cell Tower Information (where possible) and WiFi based lookup (where possible).
Developers also want to be able to asynchronously send information down to devices that have their applications installed. This is typically information pertinent to an application and the services they expose (like informing a user asynchronously that a friend may have posted something on their Facebook wall, for example). To enable this scenario easily, we have the Push Notification Service, a mechanism for sending information over HTTP directly to the phone, regardless of whether or not the application is running. This information in turn can be used to send notifications to the user in the form of a ‘toast’ or by updating a live tile on the start screen.
Example of a Live Tile
Hardware Design Specification
One of the biggest questions I keep getting is about the type of Windows Phone 7 devices that will be hitting the market. This is obviously a sensitive area for developers – the software looks great, what can I expect from the hardware?
There is a single Windows Phone 7 Series hardware specification – hardware manufacturers will use this specification as a baseline to build devices that will run Windows Phone Operating System 7.0. Developers can count on the fact that all Windows Phone 7 Series hardware will include
- a powerful processor,
- 256 MB of RAM with a minimum of 4 GB Flash,
- 802.11 b/g wireless,
- capacitive only screen,
- 5 sensors – A-GPS, accelerometer, compass, proximity and light, and,
- two options for kinds of screens; WVGA at launch and HVGA coming shortly thereafter.
The Tools
With previous versions of Windows Mobile, there were a myriad of issues with trying to acquire the right tools including things like the cost of actually acquiring the tools itself, localization issues, performance (of the emulators) and many more. Charlie Kindel, the developer platform lead, and Drew Lytle, lead program manager on the developer platform, talk about how they wanted the tooling to be “friction free” – easy to acquire, easy to install, easy to get developing.
You can head over to the http://developer.windowsphone.com portal and download a free tool, called the Windows Phone Developer Tools Preview, that will bring down the requisite pieces for you to able to developer for Windows Phone 7 Series. This download is about 3MBs big. These requisite pieces are also free and will include:
- Preview of Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone if you do not have Visual Studio 2010 installed, Windows Phone 7 Series Add-in for Visual Studio 2010 if you have Visual Studio 2010 installed
- XNA Game Studio 4.0
- Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator
Designers are a crucial piece to our application development story. Especially since Silverlight is one of the key developer platforms on board, we want to enable designers to be able to do their jobs well. Expression Blend is a tool that helps designers design Silverlight based applications. Today, we have a preview of Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone available which is also free. Christian Schormann is the authority on our team on Expression Blend – be sure to read his blog post on Expression Blend 4.
All that said, now imagine being able to use Expression Blend to design your applications, Visual Studio to complete the development and being able to create a sweet Windows Phone application that you can easily test on a highly performant emulator. *drool*
Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
Windows Phone 7 Emulator
Distribute and Monetize
Once you’re done designing, developing and testing, you want to be able to distribute your application and possibly monetize. There are two components to this piece, one is the developer portal where you can submit your applications, the other the Windows Phone Marketplace client that will help you acquire applications from your device and/or your computer. The Windows Phone Marketplace will be the exclusive way to download apps to your Windows Phone 7 Series device (we will provide avenues for developers to ‘unlock’ their phones for testing purposes). We will furnish information on submitting applications to the Marketplace at a later time.
On the device, the Windows Phone Marketplace is it’s own hub. The layout is beautiful, and it will help consumers discover apps and games easily. There are also hooks to discover relevant applications through other hubs, like being able to find a music application from the Music and Videos hub, for example.
One of the key features that have been added to this implementation has been the ability for developers to programmatically support a trial mode within their application. This way consumers have the option of trying before they buy an app. Developers will also be able to ‘deep link’ to the applications they have developed and furnished on the Marketplace from their own website, thereby making it easier for consumers to download apps.
And, students who are registered for Dreamspark can register on the Windows Phone Marketplace and submit up to two applications for free.
Ideate, Design + Develop + Test Today
@ai
now playing in my head: Steve Ballmer screaming “Phone Developers” (a la the Marionette Windows Phone 7 Series app)
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