Windows Phone 7 emulator yields its secrets

So that didn’t take long. Microsoft has made a Windows Phone 7 emulator available to all, explaining that it is a virtual machine running the real device OS. While it works fine for debugging applications, most of the phone UI is mysteriously absent, the exception being Internet Explorer (needed for testing web applications). However, Dan

…continue reading Windows Phone 7 emulator yields its secrets

Visual Studio software factories to emerge from Microsoft deep freeze

Last night at the Microsoft Mix party in Las Vegas I happened across Michael Lehman, a senior architect, who told me he had been working for the last six years on a Visual Studio add-on called Feature Builder. This turns out to be the evolution of the very same project which Microsoft’s Jack Greenfield told

…continue reading Visual Studio software factories to emerge from Microsoft deep freeze

Microsoft playing HTML 5 standards game alongside Silverlight game

I’m at Mix10 in Las Vegas where Microsoft has been showing off the latest preview of IE9 – you can try it here, provided you have Vista SP2, Windows 2008 or Windows 7.

The two themes are performance, with GPU-accelerated HTML and graphics and a new Javascript engine that compiles code in the background, and standards

…continue reading Microsoft playing HTML 5 standards game alongside Silverlight game

No native code development on Windows Phone 7 says Microsoft – so what about Flash?

Windows Phone 7 is a managed code platform, we’ve been told at Mix10 in Las Vegas. Development is via Silverlight or XNA; there is no native API.

Of course there is a native API; the question is more about what code is allowed to access it. Still, in the press briefing the spokesman was clear that

…continue reading No native code development on Windows Phone 7 says Microsoft – so what about Flash?

Microsoft copies Apple with Windows Phone app lock-in?

I’m reading the documentation for Windows Phone development. Here’s what it says:

A set of tools will help the developer to submit and certify their applications for the Windows Phone Marketplace. Applications are submitted in a .XAP file format, which is essentially one compressed file that contains all the files that are needed by the application.

…continue reading Microsoft copies Apple with Windows Phone app lock-in?

Windows Phone 7 developer story unveiled at Mix10

I’m in Las Vegas for Microsoft’s Mix10 conference, where the developer story for Windows Phone 7 series is being unveiled. According to the press release, the tooling for Windows Phone 7 looks like this:

Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone (free)
Windows Phone 7 Series add-in for Visual Studio 2010 RC
XNA Game Studio 4.0
Emulator
Expression Blend for

…continue reading Windows Phone 7 developer story unveiled at Mix10

The two specifications of HTML 5.0: WHAT WG vs W3C

I’m just back from a workshop on HTML 5, led by web standards advocate and CSS expert Molly Holzschlag. It proved an illuminating session, though not quite in the way I had expected. Holzschlag, who works for Opera, was keen to convey the ideology behind HTML 5 rather than giving us a blow-by-blow tour of

…continue reading The two specifications of HTML 5.0: WHAT WG vs W3C

QCon London 2010 report: fix your code, adopt simplicity, cool .NET things

I’m just back from QCon London, a software development conference with an agile flavour that I enjoy because it is not vendor-specific. Conferences like this are energising; they make you re-examine what you are doing and may kick you into a better place. Here’s what I noticed this year.

Robert C Martin from Object Mentor

…continue reading QCon London 2010 report: fix your code, adopt simplicity, cool .NET things

Martin Fowler on the ethics of software development – QCon report

Martin Fowler of ThoughtWorks gave what seemed an important session at QCon London, exploring the ethical dimension of software development with a talk called What are we programming for?. The room was small, since the organisers figured that a track on IT with a a conscience would be a minority interest; but Fowler always attracts

…continue reading Martin Fowler on the ethics of software development – QCon report

Penguin’s Apple love-in

An article on paidcontent gives me pause for thought. In it, Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson talks of plans to publish content on Apple’s forthcoming iPad device.

The iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers

says Makinson.

This is all to do with the App store;

…continue reading Penguin’s Apple love-in