In the post he confirms that there will be a clean cut from Windows Phone 6.X and Windows Phone 7. There will be some cases where apps developed for 6 will work on 7 but all in all… the Windows.Forms way of doing phone applications is dead.

I encourage you to read the full post, he also explains why quite well.

Microsoft will however as usual continue to support Windows Phone 6 based devices for several years.

Digi.no has published an article in norwegian about developers having to adapt to the changing requirement after reading Kindels post.

Follow the Windows Phone 7 Dev team on twitter for more information.

In 2003 i released a solution that I called “NT Services”. The goal was to have an easy access tool to information about a range of servers in a LAN, from anywhere. It was created with web interfaces working for most graphical browsers (Win/*nix/Mac), PocketPC powered PDA’s, and any device that can use the Opera Software SSR (Small Screen Rendering) browser. 

I had at the time just begun to use .NET and C# as my development environment, but because I wanted to get this done fast (I was going on summer vacation and needed access to hosted servers)  and i had 5 years previous experience with Visual Basic, I wrote it using Visual Basic for COM objects and did web and server side code using VBScript. This also became the last thing I ever wrote using this.

After release to all of the shareware sites i could find at the time around December 2003 it took only a few days before journalist Jeff Fellinge from Windows NT Magazine (now called Windows IT Pro) ask for a review copy and in the January 2004 print issue of the magazine said that “…Inexpensive and reliable; intuitive front end; quick response time; excellent management functions.. ” and that “…NT Services’ management features are equal or superior to those of other products that cost thousands of dollars…” 

I don’t know how many downloads I had all in all, but on one of the downloads sites; “Major Geek” the current download counter is just about 11000 downloads. And we sold a few thousand licenses.

The system requirements was fairly simple and needed a minimum of IIS 4.0  running on Windows NT 4 with ServicePack 6a.  To use the website you can use any of the “newer” browsers you can find for download. Supported was: Opera 7.03, Netscape 7.1, Internet Explorer 6 on the PC and on devices you could use Pocket IE (PocketPC 2002) and the first version of Opera SSR (Small Screen Rendering) browser.

Through the web interface you could do most basic things with servers and had a feature list that looked like this:

Server information:
The server information view gives you detailed information about the computer. Column 1 gives you Operating system information, like OS version, service pack, and a link that probes your computer to check which hot fixes are installed, up-time and last boot time.
Column 2 shows network information, computer role, work group and details about your NIC’s. Column 3 gives you some hardware information. RAM installed, pc type, manufacturer, model and how many cpu’s are installed. You get details about the cpu(s), clock speed, socket etc. and at last you get information about your motherboard. Manufacturer, model, bios version, serial, etc (not all information is available for all computers). All this information can be exported to a text file for download. You can also reboot the computer.

IIS Sites:
The IIS Sites tool shows you a list of all web sites running on the IIS, the list shows the following for each site: Site name, Status, Execute rights, Site rights and site bindings with all host headers, ip’s and ports. To get more details about each site just click on the details link. From both the list and detailed view you can start, stop, pause and restart each site.

Services:
Services show you the status of each computer service installed on the computer. The list can be sorted in any preferred way and shows you Service description, name, status, startup option, and service type. From the list any service can be started, stopped and restarted and the startup option can be changed between manual, automatic and disabled. Click on the service description and you get more details about each service. The detailed view gives you the same options as de list view plus dependencies information and the path to the executable.

Task manager:
The task manager shows you the running processes on the computer. The list shows process ID, process name, memory used, the username of the process owner and when the process was started. Click on the process ID link to stop (kill) the running process. Page reloads at a user selected interval.

Terminal:
An unique tool that lets you remotely disconnect and reset terminal server sessions. Very useful if you have reached the limit of 2 concurrent sessions on a windows 2k server and one or both of them are “ghost” sessions that are dropped.

Event viewer:
The event viewer shows you the content of the computer event logs. At the top you see a list of the event logs on the computer, and then by default you get the last 25 entries in the application log. At the bottom you can browse the pages of the event log. Click on the event log name to switch event log.

After the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona i am really looking forward to get a deep dive into the development capabilities of the new OS.

With me I’ll bring along a Canon 5D Mark II camera for snapshots and i’ll post updates as soon as time permits.

I am really looking forward to this!

Leaks are starting to spill out and wmpoweruser.com and engadget.com has released leaked documents on development guidelines and policies.

While reading this i can finally ”confirm”  that WPO7 Series is based on Windows CE 6. For us developers this is great news!

• An application process can now use up to 1GB of memory, limited by available memory on the device. A huge improvement from the limit of 32mb in Windows CE 5.
• An application can now spawn an almost unlimited amount of threads, Each primary thread can ”host” up to to 32 768 threads with 256 different priority levels. Which should be enough for the most of us.

The biggest change in the way we create applications will be in the presentation layer. WPO7 Series will have two UI engines.

• A Silverlight UI Framework for event driven, XAML based applications.
• An XNA UI Framework for loop-based games.

I have been waiting for the Silverlight UI Framework for soooo long   – and putting the Windows.Forms engine to rest will be a happy funeral. I do hope they have managed to put the whole Silverlight framework on the phone and not just a subset.

I am really looking forward to be at MIX10 to get first hand knowledge and experience with this.

If you attend, come visit the the Windows Phone stand! My colleague Per Ola and I will be there answering mobile development questions in all city’s.

I hope that there will be a certification upgrade possibility for those of us that already has the 70-540  certification.

Speakers for the evening is Frank Dahle, usability expert and designer. He’s “mantra” of “Mobile design is to mobilize – not to miniaturize” is something i strongly believe in and are looking forward to help spread. keywords for Frank’s talk will be; Design is how it works -not how it looks, understanding the user, design for flow and the next generation of mobile apps.

The second speaker(s) for the evening is Ronny Gydar and Trine Nesland of Gydar Industries and developers of the norwegian windows mobile program series “TrineSeries”.  They will be talking about their applications, how and why they started and about the technology behind their applications.

We are also lucky enough to have Kristine Bjørnstad who is the acting Windows Phone Lead at Microsoft Norway to come tell us more about the Microsoft headlines announced at MWC (Mobile World Congress)

Sign up and read more on the WPDC meetup page.  This info is also available in my norwegian blog.

If you got step one – integration, you´ve come a very long way! You now need to make sure that the system is capable og keeping the flow of data to and from the devices. Handle distribution of software and updates, Manage the devices within the enterprise and keep it secure in an integrated manner.  Oh, software..That is important! The software  must be possible to develop without too much of a hassle. Don´t constrain the possibilities within an already constrained mobile platform (ie javaME or .NET Compact Framework). Don´t force the look and feel.

A few days ago i picked up a tweet by Rob Tiffany at Microsoft, he blogged about Microsoft MEAP – Mobile Enerprise Application Platform. MEAP is a platform where you design toghether a set of well known Microsoft technologies, and together they make up a unified mobile application platform.

The integration engine is SSIS – Sql Server Integration Services and it has a wide range of connectors. It gives you access to your back-end data. Through IIS 7 and the SSCE Server Agent out to a Windows Phone device running an application built around the Sync Framework.  That is the basic small scale mobility platform needed by organizations from one to twenty, twenty five (guesstimate).  A small size company could easily integrate a their Active Directory or other LDAP  system for user management without to much of a cost.

What for me looks like a beauty is the scalability of this. It will work from small size to large enterprise systems.

I am really looking forward to having a closer look at this.

The installer cab can be downloaded from here.

We would also like to have an application showcase that shows the use of good UX and are open for suggestions from users and developers. If you are a developer and would like to show off you app at the meetup, don’t hesitate, get in touch with us.

The meetup will take place in Oslo in the beginning of March.