[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] Da_G:
Hi guys, sorry i'm not around too much lately, things are bad for my living situation etc. currently. It does not allow me much time at all for these projects i'm afraid :(

JTAG Connection was successful using the JTAG JIG provided by multicom! However I ran into another problem. On production device JTAG Debug functions dont seem to work (at least i'm not able to so far) raw read and raw write does function and work fine. Looks like only development/pre-production boards have debug output routed. Or maybe i'm not doing something properly. But even trying to keep the JTAG connected while the phone is assembled enough to boot up and operate is a challenge in itself, then to find out debug won't output :(

So i've forwarded all the relevant data, sources and info to Cotulla who is working on the project right now. I'll try to get some more time to work on it soon, i'm still even running a stock ROM on my TP2, which is my daily use phone! :)

Things look bad though regarding the device provisioning partition. I made some posts earlier about that (several months back) - to sum it up there is a unique device certificate that is keyed at the factory, and input into an MS database. MS will only allow access to cloud services from devices carrying a valid cert that is contained in their database. This means even if we got ahold of the private key(s) used to generate the certs, or patch out authentication on device side, cloud services would still be improbable due to server-side authentication. Most likely all cloud based services would NOT function on a device that does not originally carry WP7. (This is likely not the case for a device that came deployed with WP7 as it would carry a valid unique certificate, but there may be some munging required to get the OS to properly validate it due to checksumming etc.)

So for a fully functional WP7 on HD2 (i.e. all cloud based services operating normally) it doesn't look very likely at all right now. But probably a WP7 without the cloud based functionality could be seen soon :) It would help immensely if there was access to an HD2 WP7 BSP which some guys had claimed to have at one point.

Another major problem is access to documentation, tools, sources, etc. It is nowhere near what we had on WM6.x yet (ever?). This makes things incredibly difficult especially for someone like me located in USA and thus within the long reach of the law. Without getting too much into detail i've had some pressure on that front to not proceed further. Remember that it took several years to "open up" WM to the point where it is now, and it's like starting at stone 1 with WP7, with just a bit of a head start :)

I already put alot of work into the software side of things for WP7 development that would be applicable to any device (generic things like dump/rebuild of OS partition), so as soon as we get an official device release i'll look to update those tools to work with RTM, then release (if the applicable formats changed at all since the last CTP release I worked with, which is some months old now - looks like NBH format didnt change as NBHImageTool 1.2 and cecompr_nt.dll with XPH still works on spark rom posted recently)

Anyway, due to legal situation surrounding WP7 at this point (MS, Qualcomm, and all other involved players are being very serious about it), it's not too smart to be very public about much of anything right now. Already a number of behind-the-scenes individuals have disappeared due to that (no names that you would recognize as their participation was never public)