Well the cat’s out of the bag… actually no all that’s happened is that Microsoft has confirmed that one of the cats that was in the bag is now dead: The rumour that legacy applications will run on Windows Phone 7 series is officially dead with Charlie Kindel confirming the lack of backwards compatibility in a post entitled Different Means Better with the new Windows Phone Developer Experience.
What’s interesting is just how well the whole Windows Phone 7 series announcements have been. If you look at other blogs from Microsoft, they all have similar posts talking about the decisions that were made in order to give developers an awesome platform to start building applications on. For example the following blogs all have posts coinciding with Charlie’s post:
Andre Vrignaud: www.ozymandias.com
Christian Schormann: electricbeach.org
Windows Phone 7 Series for Designers and Developers
Shawn Hargreaves: blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar
Anand Iyer: www.artificialignorance.net/blog
Windows Phone 7 Series – Developers, Developers, Developers
Michael Klucher: klucher.com
Also confirmed in a twitter Q&A at @WP7dev was support for both Silverlight and XNA development for Windows Phone 7 series. Hopefully this will provide a much more consistent rapid development environment for building phone applications whilst still making them perform.
Currently on Windows Mobile we have a number of technologies to choose from, none of which provide a great experience to both developer and consumer without a lot of cycles invested in making your application look good. The worst part about this is not the cycles spent working out what the application should look like (eg working with a designer to make it look awesome), it’s the wasted cycles having to code it from the ground up each time.
Native C++: Sure you can do nearly anything you want but you take a major productivity hit. Not to mention building a team of top notch c++ developers is becoming very difficult.
WinForms: This just sux for anything other than a mundane LOB application. Sure you can use some of the transparency tools out there to get stylish buttons, or override OnPaint to DIY it to make it look reasonable but you aren’t really going to be doing much in the way of animations, rotating elements etc.
Direct3D: Well this is a technology flop in so far as there is little hardware rendering support out there on a lot of devices. Best to ignore this one….
OpenGL: This is an interesting beast. You can write all your code in C#, yet you have the power of doing nearly any sort of animation, rotation, translation, in fact there is a lot you can do with vectors, triangles and quads. Documentation on getting started and troubleshooting is a little light on but once you get things up and running the results are quite good. You do of course have to think in matrices, projections etc which for those not familiar with these constructs can pose a bit of a learning barrier.
So, if you were going to build a mobile application today, what would you do….. Well contrary to Charlie’s post in which he suggests that developers will continue to build for Windows Mobile, I suspect the reality is that nearly every mobile developer out there will start building Windows Phone 7 series applications as soon as the tooling arrives.