The consumer side of Windows Phone Mango was unveiled yesterday by Microsoft. It brings in some great new features like multitasking, IE9, fast application switching, maps, web marketplace etc to name a few. I was also impressed with enhancements to bing like local scout, bing vision and bing voice. With the NoDo update fiasco now behind us, I think the expectations are set just right for the ‘mango’ update which will be coming this fall ;) One thing that annoys me is the feature-market fragmentation that’s happening with Windows Phone. What’s the deal with making some features available only to a few markets! Just look at the way zune services and their features are split region-wise. It’s horrible and needs fixing.
Nothing was mentioned about Microsoft’s ad framework, PubCenter, and its expansion plans. It’s been close to 8 months since windows phone came out and PubCenter has expanded its market by zero, zilch, nada! There were talks a while back that it will be made available in europe, I don’t know how that’s working out. Hey you, make it global already! And show us some pay-per-impression love.
Tools
You can download the Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta from here, (web installer) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=77586864-ab15-40e1-bc38-713a95a56a05&displaylang=en
And if you don’t believe in web installers, here’s the link for downloading the ISO file, http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/0/D/00D22BA8-E716-4272-93D8-C4D98F0567AE/WPDT_v2_Beta_en1.iso
Aaron Stebner’s post contains some more links and other useful information, do take a look, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2011/05/24/10168008.aspx
And remember to install Visual Studio 2010 SP1 first.
You have a good day while I watch the ISO getting sucked from the interwebs at mind-numbing speeds. /s
Until next time…