Today, while reading the announcement about the new beta Mango tools for Windows Phone 7, I was surprised to see that Israel was added to the list of developer countries – when I met the program managers at Mix 11, they specifically mentioned July 11 as a target date.

A few seconds pass by and already I was into the AppHub registration process, but unfortunately Israel did not appear in the country drop down list.

I posted a question about it in Windows Phone Developer Blog and forum, and will keep you posted in this blog post.

Edit: False alarm, I got a reply on Windows Phone Developer Blog comments that the change will take place in July, as expected. Sorry guys…

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As promised during Mix 11, a beta version of the Windows Phone 7 Mango development tools is now available for download.

The Mango update seems to be answering many of the problems developers run into when planning to create new Windows Phone apps. It seems like most features will not directly affect end users, but rather make life easier for developers.

Here is a list of the new features in this version:

• Background processing
• New profiler and emulator for testing
• Use of Silverlight + XNA together
• Silverlight 4
• IE9 web browser control
• Live Tile enhancements: use of back of tiles and ability to update Live Tiles locally
• Deep linking into apps from notifications and Live Tiles
• Additional sensors; direct camera access, compass & gyro
• Fast application switching
• Networking / sockets for communications
• Local SQL database for structured storage
• Access to calendar and contacts for apps

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