Earlier
this week Microsoft Canada put on an event for the Windows
Phone 7 RTM. Joey Devilla has an excellent
post on the event, but here is my take away.
Beautiful
First off, this interface is amazing. It is functional, beautiful, and FAST.
Hardware acceleration is a thing of beauty.
Developer Friendly
Developing on competing platforms can be an ugly thing. There are a number of
reasons, all valid, but when it comes right down to it, sometimes the development
environment just sucks. Notsomuch with #wp7dev.
Full Visual Studio and Expression Blend integration is another thing of beauty.
Silverlight development is a joy in these environments. Oh, and the phone is
ALL Silverlight. How COOL is that?
Start to finish, 10 hours to develop a simple application. That includes the
learning curve of the IDE and Silverlight.
The Community
Microsoft kind of dropped the ball on 5, 6, 6.1, and 6.5 for the Windows Phone.
The community was openly hostile to this. Not too many people liked those versions.
With the introduction of 7, the criticality of the community has been high, but they
have been extremely open to the possibilities this new UI brings with it. Microsoft
is touting this as a technology reset. The community tends to agree. Let’s
hope it meets expectations when it hits the stores.
What’s Next?
Get the tools. Try it out. Find a local event that has a device and try
and break your application. Chances are, you’ll have more fun than you expect.
