In a recent blog post, Mary Jo Foley talks about Microsoft’s plans for Windows Phone developer environments, and concludes that we’re looking at a mix of Silverlight and .Net, with Visual Studio 10 tying it all together.
Mary Jo quotes her anonymous Microsoft insider as saying:
“The dev platform is Silverlight 3, plus elements of 4, using Blend and a Visual Studio add-in. The kicker is that while it is XAML-like, it is not pure XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language). This is actually OK, as it keeps the footprint nice and small.
“In theory you can make an entire app inside of Blend, but I think you will need Visual Studio to hook it all together in C#. In the war vs. Apple for apps, every .NET developer just became a Phone developer.”
This is a clever strategy. I haven’t touched a programming language in ages, and even I can pump something out in Visual Studio. In Microsoft’s race for apps (100K in Apple’s store vs. 1,245 in the Marketplace), this could be a key advantage for Microsoft.
Backwards compatibility
Microsoft has also yet to announce whether Windows Phone 7 Series will support apps written for 6.x. Clearly some UI changes will be necessary, but will the code run? Will there be some kind of compatibility mode? Expect to hear more about this at Mix 10.
