So here are a few things I found interesting from the first day of MIX:
– Windows Phone 7 series…. duh, well yes that one was obvious. It seems that nearly everyone is talking about it. In case you’ve been living in a hole somewhere you’ll have noticed that the development story is Silverlight and XNA for this platform
– Compact Framework v3.7. If you inspect System.Environment.OSVersion in the emulator you’ll see that it reports version Microsoft Windows CE 7.0.6077. This is confirmed by this post that talks about the WP7 Programming Model.
– Background Processing – That’s right, if you’re application is a good phone citizen (as defined by Microsoft of course) and you don’t consume too many resources your application will continue to operate in the background. This is demonstrable in the emulator if you create a background thread that increments a counter or prints a debug statement – when your application looses focus it will continue to increment/print.
– Symbian S60 support for Silverlight (in-browser model). The Silverlight model for WP7 is entirely out of browser. In fact your Silverlight application will be deployed via Marketplace and will not have any contact as such with the browser. S60 support, as discussed in the post Silverlight on Nokia S60 platform, is in-browser and is only a very limited subset of Silverlight 2. The obvious questions here are whether WP7 will get SL in-browser support (they’ve already been talking about Flash inclusion but why not SL) and which other platforms will be next to get in-browser support.
I’m sure there will be plenty more bits emerging from MIX over the coming days.