There hasn't been much discussion about Windows Phone 7... I don't know much about the phone hardware that's coming out, other than the standard companies are on board (HTC, etc). My interest so far has been from a future developer standpoint.
I downloaded the Phone 7 SDK last week and have been playing around with it a bit. Believe it or not, it's actually quite nice. At my current level of programming skill, I'm more comfortable with C# and Visual Studio than Objective-C and Xcode. Java and Eclipse (Android) isn't so bad, but Google really seems to go out of their way to really complicate the process. Mind you, I'm still a newb at the whole thing, so maybe I just need things dumbed down quite a bit in order to get it...
Anyway, some other things that are interesting:
- The MS Dev Program costs $99/year to join.
- The App Store split is the familiar 70/30 (60/40 with ads) model.
- You get 5 free app submissions, but then pay $19 per submission.
- Game development is done with the new XNA 4.0 Studio.
- Games built for Phone 7 can also be uploaded to Xbox Live.
- Phone 7 has complete Xbox Live integration.
- The emulator that runs within Visual Studio is very fast. The Android one used with Eclipse is painfully slow by comparison. iPhone/Xcode is in the middle.
- Students can get the Developer Tools for VS free from
Dreamspark.com (including the first year membership for free!)
Of course, like everyone else (I'm sure), the big thing I'm worried about is whether or not MS is going to do to Phone 7 what they did to every other phone OS they produced.
I'm really hoping they've learned enough from the positive things they've done with Windows 7 to not Microsoft this whole thing up. If they do this properly, I can see them making a serious dent in the Android market. The C#/XNA/Visual Studio combination for developers is a huge pile of leverage in MS's favour.
Windows Phone 7 Thread
