Category Archives: Windows Phone

Windows Phone Tango (7.1.1)

Events, Windows Phone,

Day 1 of Mobile World Congress has been the occasion for Microsoft to introduce officially the Windows Phone Tango, or Windows Phone 7.1.1

A CTP of the 7.1.1 SDK is now available. This CTP does NOT comes with a go-live license, it basically means you will NOT be able to publish apps to the marketplace with it.

“The Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 Update provides additional functionality to the existing Windows Phone SDK 7.1 software to enable mobile developers to better target applications for 256MB Windows Phone devices. This update includes an updated 512MB emulator, as well as a new 256MB emulator image, and Intellisense support to communicate device targeting preferences. Once installed, the WP SDK 7.1.1 update allows you to decide which emulator you would like to deploy your app to.”

It is important to note that generic background agents will NOT be available on devices will only 256MB of memory… Read the What’s new in Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 for more details. At this point it does not look like Microsoft has communicate any other details related to the OS itself (new features or bug fixes…).

As I said in my last post, the next big step now is Windows 8 Consumer Preview on wednesday…

Oh, and by the way, I case you missed it, Skype for Windows Phone 7 is now available in beta. Here is the QR code:

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 !

 

Developping an app for the Windows Phone platform

Tools, Visual Studio, Windows Phone, , ,

For the last few months my colleague Charlotte and I have been working on a Windows Phone 7 app we hope to release soon. Attendants of our “Performance tuning and analysis“ during the Microsoft TechDays this week had a brief overview of this app.

In this post, I wanted to share with you all the tools we’re using to build this app.Most of them are free, so they might interest you…

Productivity / Code

Libraries

Source Control

Project Management

  • AgileZen (free for managing 1 single project)

Cloud computing

Web site

I personally love all those tools and libraries ! What do YOU use for your Windows Phone 7 development ?