Alex Golesh's Blog About Silverlight Development

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Overview” - Part 0 of 8)

The Beta version of “Windows Phone Mango” tools release and it is a time to see what is expected from developers point of view.

This post is a first part of multi-part “What’s new” series which focuses on new features of “Windows Phone Mango” (or shortly Mango from this point). The Mango brings to the developer many features which we missed from initial release of Windows Phone 7 (or shortly RTM from this point). The “formal” features list includes the following features:

• Multi-tasking
  • Fast Application Switch/Resume (FAS)
  • Background Agents (Audio, File Transfers, Periodic processing)
• Enhanced Phone Framework
  • Silverlight 4
• XNA & Silverlight Integration
• Sensors & Devices
  • Motion Sensor
  • Gyroscope
  • Magnetometer (aka Compass)
  • Direct Camera access
• Local Database
  • SQL CE
• Local Data access
  • Appointments
  • Contacts
• Improvements in Push Notifications mechanism
  • Local push notifications
  • Secondary tiles
  • Flip tiles
• Networking improvements
  • Sockets
• Performance Improvements
• Tooling improvements
  • Emulator now includes Accelerometer & Location emulation
  • Profiling

Most of those improvements will be covered in dedicated post (some will share a post with others) in upcoming post series.

Stay tuned for part 1 – Local Database.

Alex