I’ve just posted a SuperSite article, Windows Phone Update: July 2010 – Availability, Developer Tools Updates, and Connected Services, that should be of interest. It has information about the Windows Phone launch date leak, the Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta and Developer Training Kit Beta Refresh, newly-announced (and previously-known) connected services, and a bit about next week’s release of the prototype Windows Phone devices for developers. Of particular interest, perhaps, since this is among the many items I’ve been waiting to discuss, is some of the new services stuff:
Windows Phone Live. Via a new Windows Phone Live site, Windows Phone users will be able to automatically back up photos from the device (albeit in low-res versions), view their Windows Live calendar and contacts, view and edit OneNote notes, and access other information from the phone. Most important, perhaps, Windows Phone Live will offer a Find My Phone service that lets you see your phone on a map, ring the phone remotely, lock it remotely and display a message, and remotely erase the phone. All of this is free.
Windows Phone Marketplace. Windows Phone apps will be available for browsing, trial, and purchasing via the Windows Phone Marketplace, which will be available on the device and, via the Zune PC software, via desktop versions of Windows.
If you sort of think about how I organized this blog, there are very few top-level "categories"–just five, in fact–and "Online Services" is one of them. (The others are Developer, Windows Phone, Writing, and Zune.) This was for a good reason: The online services stuff, hinted at above, is among the best reasons to consider Windows Phone. There’s some neat stuff going on there.
It seems like the October release date was what was originally touted before the supposed leak… at least, that’s what I had originally thought. Either that or September. (Although, maybe that’s when you mentioned your book would be finished, and so I just figured the official release date would be around that time, who knows.)
Either way, I’m thoroughly excited to see the finished product. Hopefully I can get a developer phone. I’m hoping that being a student and having very creative ideas will be able to net me one so that I can start developing those ideas. :) Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll be able to get one of these devices once they ship, not right away anyways, as it doesn’t exactly fit a student’s budget.
Once again, best of luck with the book!
Quick question Paul, I know since you have the NDA held over you, you can’t talk about details and so on but next week when devs get their phones or if some other tidbits “leak” out first from some other source does that allow you to shed some light on things or not?
I’m only asking this because I still think MS is hiding a few more nice surprises for us (at least I hope so).
I can talk about the phone when the phones go out. I will need to ask if this is an “anything goes” type of deal or whether some stuff is still under NDA. I wasn’t expecting them to talk about Windows Phone Live this week, for example, but I’m glad they did. There are a few more things like that.
Sounds like they’re basically giving away MobileMe-like features for free (which Apple should also do, because $100/year is ridiculous). I’m just anxious to know what options I’ll have for Google Calendar integration. I’d happily move to Windows Live Calendar if it offered most of the same functionality (it currently doesn’t). Hopefully that will get addressed soon.
Full support for Google Calendar in the Calendar app. i.e. it works identically to Windows Live Calendar.
Ah… Stupid me, I forgot that Google is licensing ActiveSync. That’s funny, because I was actually using it back when I had a WM6 phone and iPhone. Perhaps another question would about when Live Calendar is going to support EAS, but as long as I have some cloud-based calendar access, I don’t really care who is running the cloud.
I know one thing hurting developer adoption of this is the lack of ability to integrate the dev tools into an already-existing copy of VS 2010. I’d play with it, if I could do it on my main machine, but I”m not going to set up a VM or another computer just to play with another CTP release of the tools..
This seems like a lack of thoughtfulness.
I typically use the Express tool for Windows Phone. But I did notice on one PC with the full VS 2010 installed, it integrated right in. So that may actually be working now. But I wouldn’t read too much into that either way. This is an in-development product that’s rapidly evolving this year. They’ve already revved this stuff quite a bit.
It seems to have been fixed with the Beta release. I had a lot of trouble uninstalling the CTP and installing the Beta (requiring a full VS2010 install) and was happy to find I no longer had Express installed. I checked the Phone 7 apps I’m working on, and both loaded fine.
They are late with the controls. We have the beta release and still lacks the pivot and panorama controls. shoudn’t these have been priority #1 of the sdk since they are so prevalent everywhere else on the phone? I mean they put all this huge documenta bout UI guidelines to help you be like them…yet drop the ball by failing to deliver their complex controls on time.
The app I’m writting uses pivot and panorama and for now I have to spend time hacking this to work and potentially waste time retrofitting a bunch of code once their official controls are out. We are practically in august which leaves barrely 2 months for them to have them out and even less for developers to try them out and shake all the bugs.
MS needs to move faster.
As Steve Jobs would day, in “aw shucks” mode, “they’re makin’ ‘em just as fast as they can.”