I don't believe that Microsoft will abandon all that has gone before. I've found this comment about Compact Framework supportI know that it does not support legacy apps and so Basic4ppc won't work.
Don't worry guys. MS is not a masochist.
There are two wersions of WM7: one for Zune Phone (the one without .NET support and with Marketplace app installation) and the other one for comercial licences (the ones we know, with everything onboard - Business Edition).
"At the end of the day, we all understand that in the business of info tech, software and creativity, and the innovation of developers is important. We build a new foundation with a rich set of development tools which we'll discuss at MIX next month."
As I speak (or write) Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, is at Mobile World Congress 2010 showing off the new Windows Phone 7.
It will start shipping later this year, which got me thinking.
I know that it does not support legacy apps and so Basic4ppc won't work.
Will there be a version of Basic4ppc with support for the new WinMo 7.
I'm planning on getting it as soon as possible so it would be cool now that Windows Mobile is a dead platform.
Just speculating...
I don't do photos on a phone, I don't watch videos or listen to music, I don't play games and I don't participate in social networking of any sort. I hate dumbed-down "finger-friendly" interfaces and I loath with a passion flashy animations.
However Steve Ballmer did say "We will continue to invest in Windows Mobile 6.5 but Windows Phone 7 is a new generation." so maybe we will end up with Phone 7 for the plebs and Phone 6.5 for business and geeks.
Like everyone else I have been Googling away to find any scrap of information that seems reliable and the believable consensus seems to be that a version of Silverlight will be the execution environment for applications. This is bad in that it will probably lock out access to the actual OS, so no more P/Invokes to the Win32 API for missing functionality. However bear in mind that Silverlight, stripped of hype, is essentially the Compact Framework running in a sandbox with WPF instead of Windows Forms for the GUI and will most likely be compilable by the C# 4.0 (and VB) compiler coming in VS2010. Silverlight 3 loosened the sandbox limitations and Silverlight 4 loosens them further so Silverlight is getting very close to being a viable replacement for the Compact Framework on which it was originally based. Microsoft is not stupid and knows it must lever its' existing developer base onto the new platform without too much pain so basing development on a version of Silverlight 4 and VS2010 would seem a good way of doing this.
Don't forget there is a fairly large and very lucrative industrial/business sector, especially in the US, that has a large investment in custom Windows Mobile based corporate systems that Microsoft will not want to entirely alienate as they are also a huge source of revenue for Windows desktop and Office. The iPAQ 210/214 was aimed directly at this market as an "Enterprise" device. Industrial/military systems is where I come from and what I was/am interested in.They just said that to keep the phones selling until they release Windows Phone 7.
That's probably true, but there is promised support for another 5 years for WM6.5.there will be no future versions of the OS.
XNA, the Xbox360 and desktop games platform, and Silverlight, the Web platform, both have their own runtimes based on the Compact Framework CLR. I don't know about how XNA has developed but Silverlight has gone from running only in a Web page to being able to run as a lightweight application on the desktop (apparently) independently of a browser and, in version 4, with full trust. Microsoft talks of three screens and the cloud, TV, PC, Phone and Internet. Silverlight and .NET are the means to seamless transition between them.I never really considered Silverlight as any kind of platform. More like Microsofts equivalent to Flash that never really took off.
Unless you can can turn off or get behind all the eye-candy rubbish and do real things I see that I am going to hate this phone. I don't do photos on a phone, I don't watch videos or listen to music, I don't play games and I don't participate in social networking of any sort. I hate dumbed-down "finger-friendly" interfaces and I loath with a passion flashy animations that just waste time when I want to navigate somewhere. Unlike Windows Mobile this is obviously squarely aimed at the CONsumer and not the PROsumer like me. However Stebe Ballmer did say "We will continue to invest in Windows Mobile 6.5 but Windows Phone 7 is a new generation." so maybe we will end up with Phone 7 for the plebs and Phone 6.5 for business and geeks. I read somewhere that there are still about 30 new WM6.5 phones yet to be launched and we won't see a Windows 7 phone till November (if then!).
There are many scare-mongering rumours about lack of multi-tasking and not being able to load your own apps that might or might not be true - we won't know until after MIX10 and maybe not the full technical picture even then.
Like everyone else I have been Googling away to find any scrap of information that seems reliable and the believable consensus seems to be that a version of Silverlight will be the execution environment for applications. This is bad in that it will probably lock out access to the actual OS, so no more P/Invokes to the Win32 API for missing functionality. However bear in mind that Silverlight, stripped of hype, is essentially the Compact Framework running in a sandbox with WPF instead of Windows Forms for the GUI and will most likely be compilable by the C# 4.0 (and VB) compiler coming in VS2010. Silverlight 3 loosened the sandbox limitations and Silverlight 4 loosens them further so Silverlight is getting very close to being a viable replacement for the Compact Framework on which it was originally based. Microsoft is not stupid and knows it must lever its' existing developer base onto the new platform without too much pain so basing development on a version of Silverlight 4 and VS2010 would seem a good way of doing this. We will know after MIX10.
Here is an interesting thread over at XDA:
WP7 -IS- Backwards compatible (well almost) - xda-developers
Have a look at in particular post #8 and the attached documents.
What is occurring is a highly choreographed incremental release of the details an entirely consumer based "media" product that has no relation with computing as I know it. Unless Microsoft has an enterprise capability that it is reserving for exposure until later after the hype has faded I am afaid that this platform holds no interest for me whatsoever. I have no doubt that it is a good product for its' intended market and will probably revive Microsoft in the mass phone market but it is'nt me!
Why ask Ariel - It's Erel's product
I can't believe that Microsoft doesn't have an on-going strategy for enterprise applications like interfacing custom hardware, warehouse data collection or order taking. Whatever that strategy is, assuming they are not just going to abandon that market sector, I can't see it being based on WP7.
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