I made it to the kick off for the Summer Series for the Silverlight User Group focused on Windows Phone 7.  Here were some of the highlights:

Hardware specifications:

  • Capacitive Touch: 4 or more contact points
  • Sensors: GPS, Accelerometer, Compass, Light, Proximity
  • Camera: 5 mega pixels or more
  • Memory: 256 MG RAM or more
  • GPU: DirectX 9 acceleration
  • CPU: ARMv7 Cortex/Scorpion or better
  • Resolution: 800 x 480

It supports Silverlight 3+… which means everything in Silverlight 3 is in the phone with two primary differences:

  1. They optimized the heck of the library as they have the guaranteed GPU which isn’t the case when running Silverlight in the browser.
  2. Security model is different on the phone… it’s equivalent to “out-of-browser” / “elevated trust”

Misc notes:

  • You can not run a Silverlight application in the browser on WP7
  • You have access to storage
  • Everything installed on the phone MUST be installed through the MARKETPLACE
  • Tools are free
  • You can install the Windows Phone Developer Tools along side your current installation
  • Emulator is an EMULATOR, not a simulator, it’s the real thing
  • Emulator supports landscape mode
  • You have full debugger support
  • Can just plug in a phone and debug on it
  • Registered developers get 5 free apps and unlimited commercial apps that can be published to the marketplace.
  • Split is 70% you and 30% MS and providers on app sales
  • You can write your own subscription models or advertising engines… anything goes… except working around marketplace for application updates

The new bits are out.  I managed to complete my first WP7 application.

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