MIX 10 – First Impressions

Once of the interesting elements of this year’s MIX is the complete domination of Twitter as a medium for distributing updates. If you have been following me on Twitter (I’m @LACanuck), then you will already have heard a lot about the Windows Phone 7 development announcements. However, as useful as Twitter is, it’s not really a place for opinion. Unless your opinions fit into <140 characters. Mine don’t

Windows Phone

There is no question that there is a lot of buzz around developing apps for the Windows Phone 7. This is completely understandable, as WP7 allows Silverlight developers the ability to create applications for the phone. According to Scott Gu’s keynote, there is only “one Silverlight”. That is to say that applications that run on the browser should also be able to run on WP7.

Now there is going to be a little bit of a reality check for that statement, especially as we hit Silverlight 4. I’m not sure, for example, if Silverlight as running on WP7 has the concept of a trusted application. I suspect that it doesn’t, although I’m open to correction if my assumption is misplaced.

But working solely within the security sandbox is not the only real difference. Specifically, the design of a WP7 application is very different than a Web application. The size of the design surface is, naturally, much smaller on the WP7. And the UI needs to consider that main UI gesture is touching, a paradigm that doesn’t apply to Web applications. All of this is to say that while, theoretically, the same application could run on both platforms, it’s much more likely that different views will be used by the different targets. If nothing else screams that you should be using MVVM as a design pattern for Silverlight, this will.

Deployment

Once you see what’s possible in the WP7 environment, the excitement regarding creating applications is easy to understand. And not only are the apps exciting, so too is the ability to monetize your application. Microsoft will be making a Marketplace available so that you can sell your apps on-line. Given how well Microsoft has done with community driven marketplaces, I have no doubt this will be successful.

But what about your own personal applications? What if you want to develop a WP7 application that is used by your mobile sales force? At the moment, the answer seems to be that you’re out of luck. This might change before it goes live, but the word that I’m hearing is that the only way to get apps onto your phone is through the Marketplace.

Now, that’s not completely accurate. If you have Visual Studio 2010, you can deploy your application to a physically connected phone. However, the time to live for applications which have been deployed in such a matter is limited, To, approximately, a month. After which the app would need to be redeployed.

I’m not a fan of this. In fact, in my mind ,it drops the collection of Silverlight developers who might write WP7 apps by 50%. At least. I can take guesses at the reason why this limitation is the case, but still, it’s not what I was hoping for. The term for what I’m looking for is ‘siloed’ deployment’ (that is, deployment only for people in a particular silo) and I’m hoping that it becomes part of the released version of WP7 before it goes live with the first version.

While there is more of interest that is being revealed here, this is probably a decent start. And I’ll be both blogging and tweeting as much as I can while I’m here at MIX ‘10