As with previous Microsoft events this year–MIX, TechEd, and so on–this week’s PDC10 will have some interesting Windows Phone related content that, hopefully, will be video archived for later reference. I’m heading to Redmond now (literally; the plane has Wi-Fi) and started perusing the PDC10 web site to see what’s available for Windows Phone. Here’s what I see:
Building Windows Phone 7 applications with the Windows Azure Platform
Steve Marx
Thursday, 11:30 AM-12:30 PM (GMT-7)
Room: Kodiak
Learn how to build Windows Phone 7 applications that are backed by scalable cloud components hosted in Windows Azure. This demo-heavy session will cover best practices relating to communication, authentication, and data synchronization between phone applications and cloud components.
Things I Wish I Knew Three Months Ago about Building Windows Phone 7 Applications
Jaime Rodriguez
Thursday, 2:00 PM-3:00 PM (GMT-7)
Room: Kodiak
The Windows Phone clients for Twitter and Facebook are two new, native-looking Windows Phone applications. Come hear about all the lessons learned while developing these applications. Learn insights on UX as well as development/architecture patterns for building great, well-behaved, native-looking Windows Phone 7 apps.
Optimizing Performance for Silverlight Windows Phone 7 Applications
Oren Nachman
Thursday, 3:15 PM-4:15 PM (GMT-7)
Room: Kodiak
Hear about the key tips, tricks and common mistakes that were learned by analyzing several real world applications. See demos of how real apps are debugged. Also learn how to write world class applications with animations running at 60fps.
3-Screen Coding: Sharing code between Windows Phone, Silverlight, and .NET
Shawn Burke
Thursday, 4:30 PM-5:30 PM (GMT-7)
Room: McKinley
Get a preview of upcoming Visual Studio features that will allow you to share code between Microsoft .NET platforms. You’ll learn how to structure applications to maximize the amount of shared code, how to write an app that’s used across Silverlight Desktop and Windows Phone, and how to build business logic and helper functions that work across all 3 Screens plus the cloud.
Things You Need to Know Before Building XNA Games for Windows Phone 7
Shawn Hargreaves
Friday, 11:30 AM-12:30 PM (GMT-7)
Room: Hood
So you have a cool idea for a game. This session covers some of the less obvious things you will need to know to turn your idea into reality using XNA Game Studio for Windows Phone. Topics include how to choose the best orientation and resolution, how game content differs from typical productivity or web applications, how to deal with tombstoning, speed up load times, and how to proceed if you are interested in getting access to Xbox LIVE on the phone.
Making Money with the Windows Phone Market Place
Karen Luk
On Demand
In Windows Phone 7, Microsoft provides a central mechanism for distributing your application or game to all Windows Phone users: the Windows Phone Marketplace. In this session, we’ll review the high level workings of the Marketplace, but more importantly, we’ll drill deep on the functional criteria your application must meet, and the practices you should use in order to meet them.
Build Outstanding User Experiences in Windows Phone 7
Bryan Agnetta
On Demand
Come hear how the Windows Phone design system, codenamed “Metro”, will help developers deliver outstanding user experiences on Windows Phone 7. Learn how the Windows Phone 7 application platform makes it easier than ever to build experiences that leverage the Metro design system. This session will go in depth into not only how to use the new controls, but also how to design your application experience to leverage this compelling new application paradigm.
Is anyone actually going to PDC? I know it’s a smaller than usual show.
Have you also heard about some of the sessions they haven’t listed till after the show starts? I’m guessing so they don’t spoil some surprises maybe, could be interesting.
So have you heard anything recently about audible on wp7? Or is that DOA right now
I haven’t heard anything new. It’s not DOA. Audible will happen on WP one way or the other.
Wild PDC predictions:
- The secret Silverlight session will be about new Silverlight APIs that target features specific to a new Win 7 CE-based tablet and the XBOX360
- Announcement will be made that following the upcoming XBOX update, it will be possible to buy Silverlight-based apps from the Marketplace and run inside the XBOX
- Maybe, just maybe, they’ll mention the upcoming Win8 app marketplace
That would fit well with the session that mentions targetting 3 screens: Write SL/XNA-based apps, push them to the marketplace, and they can be purchased by users on a PC Monitor (Win8), TV (XBOX), and Tablet/Phone (WinPad7/WinPhone7).
That would also fit Ballmer’s comment about Win8 being the riskiest product, and about them being “all in” on cloud computing…. the OS becomes less critical as various devices and form factors consume apps written on the same general framework, and (so MS hopes) consuming Azure-hosted services.
Heck, a developer can dream, right?
This is a bit off topic Paul, but did you know about the hidden Copy and Search feature in mobile IE on WP7?
The guys over at pocketnow.com have a video of it, basically you can tap a word in IE to highlight it and then if you press the search key it’ll paste that word into Bing and do a search. Very cool stuff, wonder why no one else even talked about this though.
Yeah. This is not a secret feature, more of a nicety.
Microsoft briefly thought they could skip out on copy and paste, and this is one of those intelligent features they were using to prove the concept. But there are just too many instances where copy and paste is, in fact, needed, so they finally gave up on that.