Mar
9
Written by:
New Age Solution
3/9/2010 10:26 PM
My speculation based on Mix 2010 Sessions...
It is clear to me now from Mix 2010 Sessions (http://live.visitmix.com/Sessions#/tags/Mobile) that Silverlight 4 is one of the development platform for Windows Mobile 7. Here is the session summary from Mix 2010 web site:
"Together with part 2, these sessions give an overview of the functionality for Silverlight applications that is unique to the Windows Phone application platform. Part 1 will cover new input paradigms including multi-touch, software keyboard, accelerometer and microphone, as well as the APIs to leverage phone applications like email, phone dialer, contact list and more."
This is great news for Silverlight community because it will bring greater opportunity and the Silverlight skills that we developed over the years can be applied to Windows Mobile as well.
I could see why Silverlight will make great Windows Mobile application development platform.
1) Silverlight is designer friendly allowing much more intuitive, user friendly and eye catching application then traditional windows application. The fact that Adobe Illustrator graphics can be imported into Blend gives graphic designers full control over how the application should look and with animation, multi-touch, smooth streaming capability and great user experience it should be able to compete with iPhone.
2) Silverlight uses familiar .Net and it could open doors to millions of .Net developers to jump in and start creating applications. One of the reason why Windows became so popular is because many developers developed many softwares (good or bad and there are softwares for everything). And Microsoft did great job of nurturing developers to create innovative applications.
3) One consitent framework for both Phone, Web and Windows. This means Microsoft can concentrate on making one Framework better vs whereas in WM6+ it was compact framework and .Net framework.
I think key to Windows Mobile 7 success would happend when many developers jumping into developing cool applications. This I think is possible considering there are cool Silverlight applications emergin and there are even more incentive now for Silverlight developers since they can tap into Windows Mobile market. No more compact framework for Phone and .Net for Windows. We just have to develop in Silverlight for both Phone, Web and Windows using same framework.