[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] ironic77:
Dose of reality please?

Ok, this makes no sense to me. We all know that WM isn't perfect, but we should also be smart enough to realize that many of the "bumps" have been because of the way hardware-specific BSPs are done (largely outside of MS control) and how the carriers and OEMs have loaded up the images with bloatware and customizations. I know that folks on this forum have provided many fixes and tweaks, but other developers just like them are the ones who made for such a bad experience to begin with. Furthermore, the current model does not allow Microsoft to fix their mistakes by pushing patches directly.

IF many of the changes expected come to fruition, then it removes many of the middle men and allows Microsoft to quickly release patches and fix the problems that are caused by them.

What the speculated (I'm sure nothing is final much less fully understood) API changes could potentially do is prevent a careless developer from causing the entire phone to brick and require a hard reset, or generally be sluggish and unusable, which has happened to me on many occasions -- I've even done it to myself. For me, these historical issues aren't deal breakers, but for 90% of the population who just wants a phone to work, I'm thinking bringing some reasonable amount of sandboxing to the platform isn't without merit. Also, I really don't think that the platform will change so drastically that you can't make some tweaks, recompile, and get things working in some fashion -- unless you've done some sort of shell skin.

On the issue of which APIs, I for one don't see any big deal so far. I don't have tons of legacy code I'll need to update, so I can't sympathize, but the number of times I've run into a case where I've needed native Win32 access has decreased with each version of .NET. Furthermore, development is opened to more folks and there aren't memory leaks and other common mistakes made by novice programmers.

Oh joy. Unproductive ranting from someone who isn't even a developer. In all seriousness, MS is trying to change all the things that haven't worked for them in the past. They're not copying Google or Apple (thank goodness) or WM legacy -- they're trying what seems to work best from each with some of their own innovation. They are learning from mistakes made in this space as well as other products. Time will tell if it works, or if they need to make further adjustments. After all, it's really hard to do something like this and not ruffle a few feathers and cause a few incompatabilities. But if you don't do it, then you risk dying off completely.

I suspect they will listen to the market. But remember the market isn't just a handful of WM legacy power users which shrinks by the day. The broader market is consumers who want a phone and platform that "just works".

This entire release is geared towards changing the relationship between you and MS. The legacy has been between MS and the OEMs nearly exclusively -- the OEM and carriers have been the ones who controlled the relationship. Soon this will change and you'll finally get a seat at the table. "Developers, developers, developers" have always be critical to MS, and I know they won't ignore them in this release.

I fully expect forums and support channels to open with this release (today there's support, but for OEMs and carriers for the most part). We will see sometime soon I suppose. I wouldn't count it out tho' because every other consumer and developer product at MS has exactly what you're referring to.

Windows Mobile 6.x and future versions are still being developed and will still be around. Furthermore, the kernel & many of the intermediate pieces are still more or less shared between the two. The biggest change so far is the shell, but there's alot more to an OS than it's shell. I for one think that most of the changes will be for the good and plan to leave 6.x and embrace the new platform at some point.