MIX 2011: Day 2 Keynotes Summary

Yet another post on MIX 2011 second day keynotes.

The Keynotes started by Joe Belfiore presenting some information about how Windows Phone Updates are done.
Specifically, Joe answered the common questions:

• Why the update came later than anticipated? (deployments bugs..)
• Who decides when to update? (MS and the operators)

Joe stated that there are currently almost 13K apps in the Windows Phone market.
The next edition of Windows Phone Ecosystem will support 16 additional languages and up to 35 countries will be able to both publish and consume applications from the market.

The new version of Windows Phone 7 was announced, codename Mango.
Among its capabilities:

• Internet Explorer 9 on the phone, with the same HTML 5 support. There was a nice comparison of the mobile browsers iPhone vs. Android vs. Windows Phone Mango.
• Enable custom ringtones
• Improved Panorama and Pivot controls
• Sockets support
• Built-in SQL Server
• More launchers and choosers
• Calendar integration
• Motion Sensor
• Multi-tasking via fast application switching and running certain apps in the background.
• and many more…

A Motion Sensor now wraps the complex math around the accelerometer and compass sensors.

Then Scott Guthrie came to the stage and presented some new features of the Mango developer tools like the accelerometer emulation and location emulation.

And the new Windows Phone profiler that will come free as part of the developer tools.

Scott also presented many performance optimizations that where done in the Mango operating system, specifically in the following areas:

• Getting user input while scrolling
• Decoding images loaded from the net
• Garbage collection
• Memory usage

Also in Mango, support for Silverlight 4, this is a nice improvement that didn’t got enough attention, IMHO.

Next Silverlight 5 Beta was announced to be available for download.

Silverlight 5 presents many new features, among them:

• Media improvements (hardware accelerated decoding)
• New 3D XNA-based APIs
• Binding in style setters
• Implicit data template
• Data binding debugging
• and more…

Finally, the Kinect SDK for Windows was announced with a small surprise: every MIX attendee will get a free Kinect sensor to play with at home…

That’s it for now,
Arik Poznanski.