Windows Phone Mango

The latest development tools for Windows Phone are now available for download. They are very good. There are lots of extra features, and a really nice new emulator which does location and accelerometer emulation.

I reckon that Microsoft stuff tends to get really interesting around the third version. MSDOS 3.0 was the first one that really worked well, Windows 3 was the one where things got really interesting, the third’ish version of Windows NT (NT 4.0) was rather good and so on. By the time the development team get to version 3 they have got all the core behaviours out of the way and can move on to the interesting stuff that they really wanted to do when they started.

Mango is the third version of the Windows Phone software.  This is really impressive, in that the phone itself has not been out for a year yet, and the first set of development tools only appeared just over a year ago.

While you can’t get your hands on hardware yet, thanks to the emulator support you can start to write programs that take advantage of the new features, which include background processing, combined Sliverlight and XNA applications, on-board database, sockets support and lots of other goodies.

You can get the SDK here. One thing you might need to do first is install Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 – which you can find here. (this actually took longer to install than the SDK for me).

There are also loads of new examples which you can find here

I must admit I find Mango really exciting. If you want to see some videos of the new consumer features (neat things you’ll be able to do with the phone soon) then take a look here.