[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] thx1200:
I'm disappointed, but not upset. I'm excited about the opportunities and potential. .Net is still .Net. Even with a silverlight UI, a LOT of apps should recompile pretty easily to WP7S -- and they'll have a slicker new UI. :-) The biggest hurdle is unmanaged code. I'm not entirely convinced the door is completely shut. For WP7Sv1 probably yes, but WP7Sv2? Microsoft has, on numerous occassions, changed directions and policy based on developer needs. They Are Not Apple (TM).

6.5.3 was not in any internal competition. That was a very focused effort to get touch functionality ontop of the existing 6.5 system.You are thinking of what people are calling 'Photon' which was the 'next gen' of the existing Windows Mobile system before MS decided to take a more Zune approach.

WP7S still runs CE! It's CE6 which is the latest version of CE that has been out for a couple years (if I recall) and has better memory management and more APIs. I hope 6.5.3 is not the end of WP Classic and that they would put out an updated version with the new CE6 kernel, but I highly doubt it.

There's no reason WP7S can't run a standard CE EXE, assuming the necessary libraries (especially graphics libraries) are present in the ROM. The restriction will come from the shell's ability to launch such applications and whether it will tolerate them running or kill them, or whether it will always force its window ontop (etc,etc), if a hacked way is found to launch them.

Wrong. See above. Also, with more capabilities of the CE6 kernel comes a larger footprint. Part of the elegance of the way CE5 did things is that since its memory and process isolation were so simple, the OS overall was smaller and took less resources to run. I will agree, though, that since CPUs are powerful enough and RAM is not as tight as in the past, that CE6 is optimal for mobile devices and CE5 does, indeed, look antiquated. But that's more that the shell than the actual OS itself. For example, I have yet to meet an application that actually meets the 32MB memory-per-process limit that CE5 imposes. The process count limit (32 processes per system) is really the only limit that most people notice. And, honestly, if OEMs had written more services instead of loading up 20 processes that run at start, this wouldn't be much of an issue either.

It goes both ways. For what the iPhone can do (which, let's be honest, is not much outside of the slick UI and accelerated graphics), 800MB is ridiculous! It doesn't even multitask! So giving developers less room can create more efficient code.

I haven't used WCF, so I can't speak to the limitations therein, but CF is only like 3.5MB download. the Big .Net Framework on Big Windows is like 100MB. Microsoft wants CF to work on older devices that still have very restricted storage. A target of <4MB seems very very reasonable to me.

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Wank wank. Open source does not guarantee market dominance. Ask any Linux distro.

Don't get me wrong, I think Android is very intriguing, but it looks exactly like WM6 and it came out like three years after WM6! The only thing that makes Android compelling is the third party market. That's the only thing that made WM compelling. Microsoft wants to try a different approach.

More power to them. And at the same time, I hope they listen to developers and don't go too "Apple" on us with silly restrictions.