Windows Phone 7 Series

I've been experimenting and researching development on Windows Phone 7 Series. I've installed the CTP and written my first program! If you want to get started, look at this free book by Charles Petzold.

Here are some of my observations.

Dev Framework
You can only write apps using silverlight or XNA (Xbox development framework). This has some pretty big implications, such as the fact that all applications written for previous versions of windows mobile will not run on Phone 7.

All of them. Throw them away. All of those organisations who have built product and ip based on Windows Mobile will not be coming to the Phone 7 party with any advantage. In fact, most of the current applications will not even have a parallel in Phone 7.

It will be nice for people who are already familiar with Silverlight. So there might be some nice apps written targetting Silverlight. The downsides is that it will require a connection and the performance will be related to the speed of your network connection.

XNA might also bring some XBox devs across. But there's a fairly steep learning curve and isn't that accessable for noobs.

One really big advantage is that MS has taken a much stronger grip on the hardware. Their specs are much more stringent. For example there will only be two screen sizes allowed. Large and small. No more having to cater for 15 different screen sizes!

DataStorage
There is no database on the phone. Silverlight apps can access a sandbox storage location. The word I've seen on various forums is that you're supposed to use cloud for data storage and you can store simple data as xml in Isolated Storage. However, this guy (http://sviluppomobile.blogspot.com/2010/03/sqlite-for-wp-7-series-proof-of-concept.html) has a POC with SQLLite running on Phone 7.

Target audience
The phone seems to be squarely targetted at the consumer. Most of the enterprise apps will mostly likely stay at version 6.5 and earlier. In a lot of ways, it looks like they've copied the iPhone but with bigger icons on the home screen.

Does the world need an iPhone clone with no applications currently written? Who knows.