In April 2011, Nokia announced that it signed an agreement with Microsoft to build a new global mobile ecosystem that is unlike any other. The first phone coming out of this partnership has been tagged “Mango phone”. The two companies are currently working on engaging the developers to work on the platform and as such have put together a very large set of resources for the Windows Phone developers.
If you are a developer and considering developing for the upcoming Mango phones, you will find the resources below very useful:
- Official Windows Phone Developer documentation on the MSDN Library. This is where you will see all of official documentation. Quite a bit of new content was added here concurrent with the release of the new SDK
- Windows Phone Mango Training Course: This was updated for beta 2 of the SDK and it provides you step by step guidance, with complete sample code, demonstrating how to leverage the new developer scenarios in Windows Phone Mango to create a variety of real world applications.
- The Inside Windows Phone Show on Channel 9: This show provides you video walk-throughs of all new developer features, on a periodic basis.
- App Hub Game Developer Resources: This was updated for Mango and this is where you will find resources for Windows Phone game developers
If you are still wondering why you should develop apps for the Mango phones, the following may help you to make up your mind:
Smarter apps
- Improved Live Tiles – these can now hold more information and be more dynamic.
- App Connect – apps can now be included in searches (e.g. when you search for ‘movies’, the results include apps that help you find films showing in local cinemas).
- Multitasking – switch quickly between apps and allow apps to run in the background.
Better Internet
- Internet Explorer 9 – the built-in browser provides support for HTML5 and full hardware acceleration.
- Better Bing – Mango provides new ways to search including Bing Vision, Bing Audio and voice.
