Hello Windows Phone 7 OS (codenamed “Mango”)

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Perhaps you’ve heard already about Windows Phone 7 OS (codenamed “Mango”)? Here is a list of some of my favorite great new features of the update.

· Windows Phone OS 7 (codenamed “Mango”) is a free update for all Windows Phone 7 devices

· It will have the IE9 browser to support HTML5 websites

· 3rd party applications will now be able to take advantage of Multi-Tasking

o Fast application resume: Subject to memory pressure, applications may not be tombstoned when deactivated and will stay in memory. This will allow the application to come back to the foreground much more quickly than before (no need to load state from durable storage)

o Background Audio: A system service that will allow applications to queue up audio to be played in the background.

o Notifications: Applications will be able to queue up

§ Alarms; and,

§ Reminders

o Background Transfer: Applications will be able to upload or download data in the background and receive transfer status to notify the user.

· Silverlight 4 is the runtime for Mango!

· XNA Silverlight Integration: Hybrid projects will afford 3D rendering for Silverlight developers and Silverlight controls for XNA developers.

· SQL CE is on the device and available for 3rd party applications! The LINQ programming model can be used.

· Sockets are available for phone to phone communication and P2P scenarios

· Camera

o Access to Full Camera Pipeline for augmented reality scenarios

o Independent control over flash for non-gimped flashlight apps!

· Sensors (APIs to detect presence of and use)

o Compass

o Gyro

· Spatial Framework will do some of the math for you! (Unless you love DiffEqs like me J)

· Phone Data

o Contacts

o Calendar

· Launchers & Choosers

o Bing Maps

o Email

o Phone Number

o Address Chooser

o Save Calendar

· Tiles

o Update back of tile

o Multiple Tiles

· DP/Crypto API will be available to securely store keys!

· Performance improvements that will benefit existing applications!

· Profiler available in the tools

· Much more!

Look for the tools to be available in May! Watch this space as there will be much more to come on Windows Phone OS (codenamed “Mango”). I’ll be going into scenarios, new developer tools, APIs and showing some code.