Category Archives: Events

Windows Phone vNext & Windows 8 next week

.Net, Events, Silverlight, Visual Studio, Windows 8, Windows Phone, WPF

Update 26th 7:37PM: Nokia keynote live tomorrow morning at 8:30 CET. Live webcast here: http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/webcast-mwc/webcast/

The coming week should be pretty interesting for any folks interested in Microsoft technologies. The Mobile World Congress will take place in Barcelona from Monday to Friday.

Windows Phone

On the mobile space, we can expect first official information about Windows Phone Tango. Tango is expected to be a version of the OS dedicated to low-end devices. From the various leaks that occurred in the last weeks we already have some ideas of what Tango might look likes:

  • ability to import and export contacts directly from the SIM card
  • ability to send multiple images in a single MMS
  • more languages supported (120, whereas Mango supports “only” 35)
  • ability to run on devices with only 256MB or RAM
None of those information have been confirmed yet but it’s only a matter of hours now 🙂
Of course in the Windows Phone world, the next big step will be Apollo. Apollo is expected to be the next major version of the Windows Phone platform. At this point, we don’t know if Microsoft is going to talk about Apollo during MWC.
After a leak about Apollo, Paul Thurrot wrote an article describing various aspects of this new version. Here are some expected features:
  • support for multi-core processors, new screen resolutions & NFC support
  • shared components with Windows 8 (this brings a lot of question: are we talking about WinRT for example ?)
  • app-to-app communication (similar to what is available in Windows 8 )
  • IE10
  • SkyDrive & Skype integration
Again, none of those information have been confirmed yet. We will see if MWC brings more answers.

Windows 8

On wednesday 29th Microsoft will hold a special event in Barcelona for the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

The Consumer Preview will be available for download to anybody and should be feature complete. I’m expecting a lot from this release as the Developer Preview was quite incomplete regarding XAML development (for example Blend was only able to target HTML WinRT projects).

Visual Studio 11

With the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Microsoft confirmed this week that we are also going to have access to Visual Studio 11.

Visual Studio 11 will include most of the extensions currently available in the Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2010. The XAML designer will be shared with Blend (hopefully that we will to better performance & less design-time issues). There are tons of other changes, improvements and new features…

For more details, you can check out those posts: Introducing the new developer experience part 1 & part 2.

Of course I’ll try to play with all those new toys as soon as possible. So you should expect more blog post this week !

 

Welcome 2012 and happy new year!

Events

The beginning of the year always seems the appropriate time to take a step back and see what happened in the last few months… So let’s take a deep breath…

The last year has been a busy for me… At the beginning of February I had the chance to give a talk about Rx (Reactive Extensions) in Paris for the Microsoft TechDays with my colleague Charlotte and ex-Microsoftee Mitsu Furuta. It was my first talk in such an event and it was a very valuable and interesting experience.

Few weeks after that, I went to the US for the very first time. I was in Redmond for a week for the annual MVP Summit. I had a dinner with the WPF Disciples where I finally met in person some of the guys of the group. I also discovered the Microsoft campus in Redmond, had a dinner with members of the WPF team…

In September I went to Anaheim (near Los Angeles) for //BUILD/. It was an amazing time. I’ve never seen so much enthusiast and it was truly amazing (maybe the Windows 8 slate distributed during the event is part of that!) It was also the occasion to meet new people.

In November, I went to Lyon for the MSDays as ATE (Ask The Expert) in order to discuss Windows 8 (and show the //BUILD/ slate):

Blog post activity has been also important and more varied (Windows Phone, Windows 8, WinRT…)

In 2012, I hope to do more work with Windows Phone. As an introduction to that, I’ll be speaking at the Microsoft TechDays in February on the subject “Performance analysis and optimization of Silverlight Windows Phone app”. I’ll write a blog post about this session very soon.

Happy new year to all my readers, and thank you for reading this blog and sharing your feeling in the comments!