Windows Phone 7 “Mango” Developer tools and platform

Last week at MIX11 we announced the next update coming to Windows Phone 7. Joe Belfiore, overseeing Windows Phone Program Management talked about the current state of the phone (more than 12000 apps in the marketplace) and then switching to what’s next. The “Mango” update is coming to developers next month but you can start getting up to date with the latest capabilities by watching or downloading the sessions covering the new APIs and capabilities given during MIX11.

The main announcements

• Internet Explorer 9 coming to Windows Phone – with the same code base and features as the desktop with some minor differences specific to the phone (no Activex support for example). This brings HTML5 rendering engine to the phone. It includes hardware acceleration, although taking into account smaller GPU.
• Multi-tasking and Live Agents: real time interactions via Live Tiles, Push Notifications, Deep Linking and Background Agents.
• Live tile enhancements such as multiple Live tiles per app, deep linking, …
• Silverlight 4
• Sockets
• Ringtone API
• Raw camera feed access to applications
• SQL CE: in-memory local SQL database for ease of data applications
• Additions to developer tooling: new Location tooling, Accelerometer tooling, profiler and support for Silverlight and XNA in the same project
• Marketplace: going from 16 to 35 countries with Marketplace for consumers, 30 to 35 countries for devevlopers selling apps
• New languages support, including Dutch
• …

Please watch Day 2 keynote with demos by Joe Belfiore and Scott Guthrie on the new features and developer tooling, and discover in-depth information about the upcoming update via through the recorded Windows Phone sessions from MIX11.

You can also find more information at the official Windows Phone team blog: Be What’s Next with “Mango” Developer Tools and Platform