Future of Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 been recognized as one of the major release by Microsoft, just like the way Windows 7 win the hearts of millions of Windows 7 users around the globe. Recent survey indicates that over 350 million licenses of Windows 7 has been sold across the world so far.

The MetroUI – Design Guidelines/language for Windows Phone 7 has made the phone look more interesting and snappier. Also Microsoft is planning to bring MetroUI guide lines as part of all future releases of “Windows” and “XBox” as well. Cool isn’t it.

Interesting face we all got to know in the past was about “Nokia” and “Microsoft” tie-up for WP7 as mobile platform for “Nokia” devices. Nokia already working on different variants of windows Phone 7.

Another interesting fact is recent surveys indicated that “Windows Phone 7” will be the “No.2” mobile platform by 2015.. So future is good for Microsoft and .NET developers like me who are targeting Windows Phone 7.

The Mango Upgrade

Upcoming upgrade of Windows Phone 7, called “Mango” platform is going to make lot other changes in Windows Phone 7. To provide more developer support and make developers life more easier Microsoft has made so many enhancements to Windows Phone 7 – Development Tools for Visual Studio .

With Mango release you will have local database(SQL Server 4 Compact Edition(CE) – a light weight edition of SQL Server for embedded devices and smart phones). So your application needs to have a local database hosted within your WP7 device ( the fact most of the applications nowadays utilizes the offline functionality, so that application can work fine with out the need of depending on the network signal. At certain period or frequent basis when the device is online the application will synchronizes with the server).. Good options right.. Android and iPhone applications are utilizing SQLite( a file system based database) and for WP7 soon we will have SQLCE 4.0

IE9.0 and HTML integration, Silverlight 5.0 and multi-tasking(an application can parallely run multiple tasks in device) capability are also expected to be part of Mango release.

Windows Phone Developer Tools for building Mango applications will be available for free next month, featuring improved emulator capabilities, including location simulation. Location simulation will help the developer to actually simulate the GPS location services in “Windows Phone 7 – Emulator“

Profiler for Windows Phone 7 in Mango developer tools will help developers to profile the performance of the application and identify any memory leakage and slowness which execution of the application etc.

and with this release we can develop applications with “Silverlight” and “XNA” combination. Prior mango we were restricted to choose either “XNA” or “Silverlight” for development. With mango, both are clubbed together in WP7-Architecture base and we are allowed to develop applications with a combination of “Silverlight” as well as “XNA”. Great improvement.

I waiting to see Mango developer tools to get released to try out all the stuffs.

That’s all I thought of writing today. Read through it and leave any comments if you can. It would leave a good discussion thread started.

Reference links

Read more about Metro

More developer resources for Windows Phone 7 from Microsoft

  What’s New in the Windows Phone Developer Tools? | MIX11 | Channel 9

Smartphone market to grow 50% this year; WP7 to be No.2 OS by 2015