Windows Phone Thoughts: Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Info Starts to Flow

"Different is often good. Especially when it's different for good reasons. Windows Phone 7 Series is different because we reset everything we were doing to focus on end user experience. This extends directly to the developer platform. Developers, designers, and producers of applications, games, and content these days are demanding that we be different as well. Over the last year we've had face to face conversations with 100s of developers all over the world about what we should do with Windows Phone 7 Series."

I think the above screen shot is fantastic, because it shows exactly how different Windows phone 7 really is - there's a strong sense of sameness as you move from left to right, but when you hit the Windows phone 7 user interface, you have to stop and take note that it's completely different from the others. Microsoft is taking a big risk by breaking away from the pack of normalcy every other mobile phone OS brings to the table.

Now, on to the developer stuff: first off, and this is no shock, there's zero backwards compatibility with Windows Phone 6.5 applications. This will doubtless upset some end users, and developers, but it underscores the point that this really is a brand new operating system. Yes, it's still based on Windows CE underneath (version 6 in this case), but it's not a coat of paint on the old Windows Mobile house. They tore that house down and built a whole new house in its place. Developers are going to need to re-code their apps. So what will they code it in? So far, we've been told Silverlight and XNA. Kindel's post also mentions Web 2.0 Standards and Microsoft developer tools, along with .Net. Nothing about C++ or native code versus managed code, but I suspect it's more the latter and less of the former. I'm not a developer though, so I'd appreciate hearing your opinion after you parse Kindel's post.

Hit up Charlie Kindel on Twitter to ask questions; at the bottom of his post there's also a number of Twitter accounts from other members on his team, so start asking questions - and be sure to report back here with the results so we can get an understanding of the developer story for Windows phone 7.