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MIX10 @ Las Vegas – Day 1 Keynotes and Announcements Summary

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MIX10 is the fifth annual edition of the Microsoft Mix conference in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay. Just like other Microsoft conferences, the videos of the sessions are available online about 24 hours after the event at https://live.visitmix.com.

MIX10 kicked off with a keynote from Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president .NET Developer Platform and Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president and director of Windows Phone Program Management.

During the keynote, Microsoft announced:

  • Availability for Silverlight 4 RC. The final release of Silverlight 4 is expected next month or so. (It’s just a guess!!).
  • Unveiled the development platform for the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7).
  • The RC of Blend 4 is available today as well.  Good news for current Blend owners is that the upgrade to Blend 4 is free.

These two products will bring new applications, games and experiences to life. All of these downloads are available at:

https://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4/#tools  and https://developer.windowsphone.com.

The most pleasant surprise for the developers from the keynote on Monday was that Microsoft development tools for WP7 will be available free. The preview bits for Windows Phone Developer Tools are available for download at https://developer.windowsphone.com. Windows Phone Marketplace will be the location for WP7 application distribution. Annual membership ($99) is required to join the marketplace.  Developers can earn 70% revenue from the applications they sell via the marketplace. The registration to the market place is free for the DreamSpark program for students

The application model supported on Windows Phone 7 series will be *managed* only and will leverage Silverlight, XNA and the .NET Compact Framework. So basically you can reuse your C#/.NET and Silverlight skills to build amazing experience on the phone.  This builds on the amazing development experience brought in by the Visual Studio 2010 shell. You can either get a standalone Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone Or install an add-in for VS 2010. Yes, you do not even need a device to develop for Windows Phone as you can test your app using WP7 emulator.  The WP7 emulator fully mimics the WP7 device including multi-touch screen and dropped call simulation and low battery conditions.  The development message of the WP7 emulator being enough to provide a good development experience.

Several impressive demos emphasized that application development for WP7 should be fun, rewarding and exciting.

  • The Netflix demo application in Silverlight 4 showed that watching and pausing recorded TV programs and movies (on demand from Netflix) on WP7 will be the norm.
  • To show how efficient Silverlight development for the WP7 can be, Scott Guthrie used Blend 4 Beta to create a very simple Twitter client using live data from his Twitter profile.
  • The WP7 emulator fully mimics the WP7 device including multi-touch screen and dropped call simulation and low battery conditions.
  • Simple game development with XNA was also shown in a demo, as the WP7 is also an Xbox Live client.
  • One of the more entertaining moments in the keynote was the WP7 remote controlled t-shirt cannon that maneuvered on the stage, aimed and fired Guthrie-red Polo shirts into the audience.

Other third party application demonstrations were also impressive.

  • The eBay listing application in Silverlight seemed to really simplify the process while making the interface more aesthetically pleasing.
  • The Shazam music service allowed user to upload an audio snippet through WP7 for the service to identify the song and artist returning album art, related content through Zune integration and the opportunity to purchase the music.

I hope that this summary will help you to catch up even if you missed the event and its demo/announcements.

Thanks for your time.