yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] landslide:
If I were running a big company with deep pockets like Microsoft, I sure as hell wouldn't have all my eggs in one basket.

Actually it's over three years old...

Yeah, yeah... it's all the OEM's fault :) I still stand by my original point that CE is far removed from desktop windows and Microsoft have failed to keep them aligned to their own peril...

The underlying O/S still has multitasking, it is a conscious decision made by the vendor to restrict developer's access to multitasking for the betterment of the user experience. It seems this might be the road Microsoft are going down. I would have much preferred an approach like Android which singles out poorly written applications that consume excessive CPU/IO resources and notifies the user... who then demand a refund or delete the application.

You're kidding right? .NET CF IL is JIT compiled per method as the code path is executed. JIT'd machine code is also pitched when applications are sent to the background, slowing them down if you task switch often. Most of the size limitations are storage concerns (how cheap is flash now-a-days?) and I suspect (predominately) a result of underlying Win32 API deviations (note my earlier point on keeping CE aligned to the desktop).

30Mb for the full framework is not too much ask. Then again, if you read up on why and how Android's Dalvik designers deviated from java bytecode you'll realise that it is fundamentally tuned for mobile devices. On the other side of the fence, the main downside is that there is not much visibility of how .NET CF works under the hood as it is not "open". THe executable layout AFAIK is very close to the full framework.

Take a look at Android's API's and the overall design of the O/S, especially how tuned it is for constrained environments. From a geek/developer perspective it is miles ahead of what everyone else is doing. It is indeed far from the "fisher-price, double click a button and code an event handler" programming paradigm of Microsoft elk. But 'fisher-price' programming is only great for 5 minute throw together applications or conference demo's, rarely applicable to large real-world applications (which is a little ironic).

My sentiments exactly! ;)
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] pilgrim011:
This is not true. The link that you posted is for .NET Compact Framework 3.5, not for .NET Framework 3.5, which is about 200 MB (full package, not a bootstrapper): http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/0/e/20e90413-712f-438c-988e-fdaa79a8ac3d/dotnetfx35.exe .;)
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] landslide:
Good point. If you refer to http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/292203.aspx, things look like they kind of got out of hand in 3.5. Is it possible that bloat is starting to set in?

I think .NET CF 3.5 has a 6.5Mb footprint on the device.

Ideally the compact framework footprint should share a set of core fully-featured components with the full framework, rather than a subset.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] j2inet:
I think a fundamental obstacle in discussion of multitasking capabilities is the lack of sufficient terms to described the restricted multitasking that we see today. Instead of just prefixing the word "multitask" with "can" or "can't" that there should be some other terms to describe the areas inbetween (ex: something to describe being able to run multiple service processes but only one UI based process).

Ouch! That's a hefty download. But I took a look inside of it that appears to be more than just the 3.5 framework. t looks like 2.0 framework, the 3.0 stuff, the 3.5 framework, and some other tools for the x86, ia64, and x64 processor architectures. Just looking at the .Net 3.5 stuff it is 31.5 megs (12 megs for ia64, 10.8 for x64, 7.78 for x86).
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] mark_6700:
Guys, I've been working with MS stuff since the early days of DOS - including software development, end user support, network architecture, and so on - the full gamut.

The overall lesson I've learned is this: Microsoft ONLY does what is good for Microsoft. Meanwhile they work very hard to convince you that they have your best interest at heart so that you don't see what's really happening. They'll make claims of "better security" while leaving out the fact that they are the source of the security problems to begin with (self-fulfilling prophecy that serves their ultimate goals). And they'll make claims of "quality control" - as if they were able to be the judge of that when their own software suffers horribly from pathetic quality (how many MS hotfixes did you load last year?)

Like Apple, the Marketplace is designed to levy control over every developer AND end user simultaneously - and make you pay for the "privilege". It's a total pathological ploy which the masses fall for willingly. Both companies work for total control. They are entirely pyramid centric. And you will *never* get anywhere close to the top. Instead, your roll is to forever uphold the pinnacle of the pyramid. That's the best you can ever be - a foundational grunt.

And of course this also means if some day they deem you unworthy or persona non-grata for any reason they can completely pull the plug on you - you'd then have no access to Marketplace, et al, and so on.

My advice would be this: If WM7 doesn't allow users to maintain the relative openness they enjoy now with WM6.x you can either take your place as a grunt in the MS pyramid - or - you can drop all your support for WM platforms and convert your talents towards helping to build out Android - because it's open source, it's based on a circle mentality where everyone benefits, there is no pinnacle, there are no grunts, and freedom and creativity reign supreme.

So that's my perspective after a couple of decades of dealing directly with MS solutions. To me, the initial specs of WM7 comes as absolutely no surprise. It's entirely expected and flows with the MS trends that have taken place over the past couple of decades. The tracks of the wagon wheel reveal the destination...
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] vangrieg:
Doesn't every company on Earth do that as well (well, at least consciously, some stupid moves don't count)?

Moreover, call me a cynic, but that's what I do as well in relation to MS and other companies' products. I use them if they suit my interests and don't use them if they don't.

Doesn't it make sense?
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] mark_6700:
No. Consider Canonical (primary force behind Ubuntu) for only one example of many.

No it doesn't. What you wrote isn't relevant to what I wrote. You're missing the point for lack of seeing the bigger picture - no offense intended. The key element is intent.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] ramdroid77:
Every company would act like Microsoft if they were that big. They only do what other companies do as well: increase their popularity, earn more money. No one cares if smaller companies are "acting" like that because their influence might not be so significant.

About MS bugfixes and such: under how many different circumstances did you say is Windows (the desktop OS) running? It's impossible to NOT have issues, security leaks and everything. It's not like Apple who only need to support their own hardware. Easy job.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] Jim Coleman:
Android.....isn't that an OS built by an Advertising company? Advertising is Google's primary purpose in life, and I'll make a prediction now:

Android will remain all open and cuddly until Google deem that they have enough market share and then.....whammo! They'll justify all their outlay in developing it by making it Advert-funded. Yes, your phone will become a mobile Advertising booth.

Mark my words!

At least Microsoft is.....a software company....that makes its money from.....software!

With Google, software is simply a means to an end, and that end will always be advertising revenue.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] ramdroid77:
Besides that they'll also track every move you do. No thanks!
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] Jim Coleman:
...and here's another thing to think about.

Google's "corporate motto" is "Do no evil".

Now what kind of company *needs* to have that as a motto? Eh?

You don't go around repeating to yourself "I mustn't be a bastard" because you already know you're not. You would only need such a motto as "do no evil" if you already thought you *were* evil. And being an advertising company, I can well imagine Google needs *constant* reminding!
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] mark_6700:
You guys are missing an important point about Android. It's open source. Anyone can download and modify it and use it on their phone. It's being ported to Touch Pro 2 platforms right now. And it can be ported to other platforms. Sorry if I wasn't clear, I was suggesting that it be used as an open platform phone OS - which of course means nothing inside that isn't wanted, like google ads, etc. It's essentially a mini Linux platform. I was speaking to people who actually write code.

Furthermore I am not saying don't support WM7 - I am saying if it doesn't lead where you want to go, there is a very viable alternative.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] landslide:
A company's motto defines its culture. Being in a position that Google are, with the potential to exploit users data, I think it is essential. The motto becomes part of the substance of the company.

The whole 'Google is antichrist' is ridiculous, exactly the same argument is applicable to Microsoft's efforts around Live and now Bing. Based on past performance, I certainly know who I would want being responsible and impartial to my data...

If you think there is a better way, why not start a company and compete?
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] vangrieg:
Well, I was talking about real companies with real products, not the kind of stuff you're talking about, which is completely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

If a real company (not a bunch of religious zealots) are doing something like Ubuntu then they are either idiots, or have other indirect methods of turning a profit, or are merely tools for other big companies to make bigger profits (think IBM/HP/Linux, Google/Firefox, Nokia/webkit etc.). None of these reasons guarantees a better life for me.

1. I'm not a missionary and don't buy things for religious reasons. I buy them to use them for my purposes.

2. I'm not "missing" the bigger picture, I have a different attitude towards it than you do. I don't think that making money is "evil" or that it'll inevitably hurt me somehow. Or even that doing something out of pure humanitarian motives will do me good. Think Communism or Chistianity.

3. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] weesals:
Suspending the application is the same as the kernel stopping execution of its code. I dont think they will page the app, that would have much higher memory costs and be harder for the OS to manage system-wide resources the app may have locked (Also I dont think paging in this sense is even supported in CE). Instead I think they will just fire an event requesting that the app prepare for suspension, then pause it. And for serialization, since its all managed, they dont need to dump the entire apps memory, just enough such that the CF can reload the app as it was (ie. no need to save data loaded and stored internally from resources, such as models or textures from XNA games.)

Microsoft refusing to answer questions directly regarding the prototype phones ability to multitask speaks for its self; they dont want apps multitasking in the traditional sense.

I agree that security also plays a major role in choosing managed vs unmanaged, but its not the only reason. Implementing DEP and ASLR in addition to controlling what apps may be installed (through Marketplace) would be enough to keep unmanaged apps secure.

Of course this is all just personal opinion and I could be completely wrong, we'll just have to wait and see.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] RustyGrom:
Is DEP even supported on ARM? DEP requires CPU support.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] thx1200:
This is one of the strikes against Android, in my opinion. Rapid Application Development is something essential to many software companie trying to bring an app to market. Making something more involved and closer to the underlying native API calls does not necessarily speed up the application, but it does make the development process longer.

Call it "fisher price" if you want, but I'll take whipping up a two hour app that's useful because I can use short-cuts to event handling (and so on) over having to hand code everything ANY day.

I used to be a posix C++ developer and holy crap I do not miss that since switching to .Net! lol.

That said, I didn't make my statements to diminish Android as a platform. I think it is a powerful platform and it is doing well in the market. I'm just saying that RAD is very important and Microsoft wins that hands down.

Plus, Android's Java may not be as much of a rapid platform as .Net CF, but it's lightyears ahead of Objective-C. I think we can all agree that Objective-C is a garbage development language, right? lol ;-)
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] thx1200:
That was my point, but the sarcasm didn't show through in my post. .Net is for sandboxing, not some esoteric control over application execution (which can be done with an unmanaged application as well).

I disagree. They aren't answering any questions at all. This is very typical of large companies like Microsoft. You don't confirm nor deny ANYTHING until your scheduled release dates. The only reason we're even asking this question is because of a rumor that is unsourced. Microsoft is not going to answer every unsourced rumor. It puts them on the defensive and they don't want that from a marketing perspective.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] thx1200:
Charlie Kindel on Windows Phone Development

Some interesting stuff at this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ckindel/archive/2010/02/22/focus-focus-focus.aspx

And it's OFFICIAL Microsoft information too. :-)

My favorite part. This is Microsoft's official prioritization list.

Notice that the 'non-pro' or hobbiest developer is #2 on their list right after commerical developers for consumer apps. That has to speak well for the xda community. And yea, yea, I know it says 'personal use' so somebody is going to immediately say "side chaining requires visual studio?!?!!" We don't know yet. Even if that's the case, I have every faith in xda or ppcgeeks to crack that nut, should it arise. Right now, I'm not worrying about it. I have two more years (at least) of WM 6.5 development to do as I am on contract. ;-)

Also notice In-ROM developer... See? Not everything will be centralized. WP7S ROMs will probably have unique flavors and differences, just maybe not as dramatic (Sense UI versus Titanium versus Mobile Shell) like now.

Just hoping this will cheer up some of the negative feelings about WP7S. :-)
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] lightandshadow:
If OEMs stop making devices that run Windows Mobile because they failed to compete in the open market, your client won't have devices to run your Win32 apps on for much longer.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] lightandshadow:
The one app at a time limitation is imposed at the application management level. iPhone OS supports fully preemptive multitasking in the kernel. You can spawn multiple-threads inside your app, however, when the user exits your app, all of your threads quit as well. The model is essentially the same as Cocoa apps on Mac OS X on the desktop, but only one third party app can be running at once.

It's likely that the devices with the new A4 processor will run multiple threads concurrently on each core without any changes.

iPhone apps can be written in C++ (Objective-C++) and Objective-C is a subset of C, so you can drop down to C if performance is an issue. The biggest hurdle in porting games from the desktop is moving to OpenGL ES (along with obvious UI issues, like a smaller screen and lack of a mouse, etc.)
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] lightandshadow:
Having moved from Java to Objective-C, they are very similar in many ways. The Cocoa framework is very mature and well designed. Memory management is relatively painless as long as you follow the well defined retain / release conventions.

Interface builder allows relatively rapid development if your UI is mostly built on standard UI elements. (see a tutorial here www switchonthecode com /tutorials/creating-your-first-iphone-application-with-interface-builder )

Core Animation makes it easy to add simple animations to your application without much effort at all as it's build into CocoaTouch framework and UIView.

// setup the animation group
[UIView beginAnimations:nil context:nil];
[UIView setAnimationDuration:0.75];
[UIView setAnimationDelegate:self];
[UIView setAnimationDidStopSelector:@selector(transitionDidStop:finished:context:)];

// swap the views and transition
if (frontViewIsVisible==YES) {
[UIView setAnimationTransition:UIViewAnimationTransitionFlipFromRight forView:containerView cache:YES];
[playerCardView removeFromSuperview];
[containerView addSubview:playerCardFlippedView];

} else {
[UIView setAnimationTransition:UIViewAnimationTransitionFlipFromLeft forView:containerView cache:YES];
[playerCardFlippedView removeFromSuperview];
[containerView addSubview:playerCardView];
}
[UIView commitAnimations];
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] thx1200:
Which proves my point. It's incredibly bloated and doesn't do much as an OS.

That makes no sense. If it's pre-emptively multitasking (which, I know, it is), then they can do it right now but they don't. They may enable it in the future, but only because they know that Apple fanboys will swoon immediately and spend another eleventy gazillion dollars to upgrade. It won't have anything to do with the CPU. It will be a marketing move.

The same can be said for C as long as you follow the well defined malloc / free conventions. But we still have apps with memory leaks. Not to mention the far worse memory mangement bug known as the buffer overflow.

Objective-C is not a RAD language.

Wow, that code snipit was so intuitive.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] geek111:
I don't mean to be down on Microsoft quite that hard. I'm just pointing out that they aren't in line with the other mobile platforms as far as out of pocket cost of developing apps.

To get into the Windows Mobile Marketplace you've given Microsoft- $600 on Visual Studio + $99 per year + 30% of your gross sales and then there's a $99 per submission charge as well? But for iPhone, it's $99 per year + 30% gross sales. Other smart phone platforms pretty much all have free development tool (Android, Maemo, Symbian, Blackberry).

It just seems that this has a correlation to the number of apps available (if not their quality...) I mean 200000 apps available on a platform whose main language is Objective C? F*** Me! Try my new FREE COBOL compiler guys!

Cheers,

Charles

Another thing- There's a lot I'd give up from Windows Mobile 6 just to have some unified APIs for mobile hardware in WP7. Camera, Accelerometer, Multi-touch, the usual... I'm just sick of getting 640x480 through Direct Show out of a 5MP camera. ;-)
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] RustyGrom:
I'm fairly certain that MS will be utilizing C# Express (a free version of visual studio that allows c# dev) and probably some sort of Expression Blend Express (also free) for WP7 dev. XNA is designed to specifically work with C# Express. In fact, the first versions only worked with Express and not with Visual Studio Pro.

In regards to the $99/submission... hopefully that goes away but I'm not as certain about that.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] ramdroid77:
VS Express so far didn't contain the mobile platforms so why should it change? If they want that more apps are developed this way then they already would have added support to VS Express prior to the orginal launch of Marketplace. I really don't get this half-ass approach....
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] vangrieg:
Well, they are changing quite a few things with WP7, so this could be one of them.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] thx1200:
Just to clarify, it's $99 for 5 apps per year.

At least one of the methods for developing for WP7S will be XNA, which works on C# Express.

Additionally, Mobile development has officially been completely decoupled from Visual Studio 2010. Microsoft has even officially stated that WP7S development will be a separate download from VS2010. Now, that could still mean that for the Silverlight/WPF development, you need some higher version of Visual Studio (nothing said so far), but it would seem to me to make sense that the Express environments would be a possibility. Especially since XNA works that way.

You ask why it should change? To be competitive with the other platforms with lower cost development environments.

The $99 submission fee is pretty damn reasonable for Marketplace. It will keep out the riff raff, maintain a certain level of confidence in apps downloaded from it (ie, won't brick your phone), and you will easily recoup the expenses if your app is any good.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] ramdroid77:
well this seems possible. but then I wonder why they even bother to release a 6.5.x SDK if the mobile platforms are removed from their main dev platform anyway.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] thx1200:
6.x development will still require VS2005/VS2008. As far as I can tell (from reading forums on the VS2010 beta), there will be no support for the older platforms in 2010. :-( It's possible the SDKs might be updated for 2010, as there is no official word really, but from what I've seen, no luck so far.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] Shasarak:
I can't imagine many people will distribute their apps for free if they have to pay even that much for the privilege of doing so. That won't be a problem if .cab installs still work; but if the only way to install software is via the Marketplace, and the only way to get an app into the Marketplace is to pay $99, then that basically means the end of free utilities and downloads (short of some warranty-violating jail-break procedure - but there's no guarantee that will be anywhere near as easy as it is on the iPhone).
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] vangrieg:
I can't imagine this either, but they do pay for being in AppStore, AFAIK. Granted, it's $99 for an unlimited number of apps or some such stuff, but still. I certainly wouldn't. In addition to paying, there's also quite a lot of hassle in the process of registering on Marketplace - it's pretty much designed for companies, not individuals.
[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] freyberry:
I have a developer's account at Apple for the App Store. Their policies are "OK", I would say. I hate the "censorship", but that's another story.

Microsoft's policies for the Marketplace are crap. They charge much more than Apple, take much longer to approve apps and don't pay developers for a long time.

That way, they will not get any developers excited for WP7. But it's Microsoft, so no surprise there. They just don't get it. They think it's enough to make an exact copy and be "just as good". But if you're playing catch up, like they do so often, then you have to be better. You can't catch up when you're moving at the same speed (i.e. in this case the same or even worse policies than Apple).