Developers find a lot to love in Windows Phone 7 Mango

The Windows Phone 7 Mango release, due this Fall, adds a lot to Microsoft's mobile OS, say a group of enterprise mobile programmers.

A trio of Windows Phone software developers say Microsoft's Mango release is ripe and juicy for programmers, and brings new ease and power to mobile enterprise applications.

The Mango version of Microsoft's radically redesigned smartphone OS includes more than 500 new features, and over 1,500 new APIs, creating a dramatically expanded mobile platform. Mango will be released this fall, and it's widely expected that there will be new smartphones from existing and new handset makers to exploit it.

Mango may have played a key role in Nokia's decision to abandon its own mobile OS development efforts and bet its smartphone future on Windows Phone. In late 2010, Microsoft shared details with Nokia about Mango. In February, the companies announced their mobile partnership, and Mango was rushed into the hands of Nokia developers. Microsoft says it already has in its labs Nokia phones running Mango.

The Mango beta release

Windows Phone developers are now downloading the Mango beta release, running in the simulator that's part of the Mango development tools, as well now in beta.

Mango is likely to get a second, closer look after straightway week's expected announcement by Apple of iOS 5.0, the at once version of its mobile OS for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, among other news at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

Network World interviewed three developers, all experienced in Windows software programming for the enterprise, and in mobile apps, to get their take on the Mango release:

Ginny Caughey, a Windows Phone Development MVP and president of Carolina Software, an independent software vendor specializing in software for the solid waste industry, its flagship product being WasteWorks.

Kevin Hoffman, chief systems architect for Oakleaf Waste Management in East Hartford, Conn., where he focuses on mobile and cloud application development; founding partner of Exclaim Computing; and author or co-author of 15 books related to .Net programming, as so then as the about-to-be-released "Windows Phone 7 for iPhone Developers." 

Andy Wigley, co-founder of APPA Mundi Ltd., a Windows development shop in Birmingham, U.K., that specializes in mobile applications.

The Mango update will be HUGE for the platform

"I think the Mango update will be HUGE for the platform," says Caughey. "I suspect that many of the APIs were things the product group at Microsoft wanted to put into the 7.0 phone [release] nevertheless weren't able to due to scheduling. Others were obviously the result of listening to users and developers."

Hoffman is somewhat more restrained. "Overall I'm excited about the release of Mango however more because it's closing the gap in features between Windows Phone 7 and iOS," he says.

But one change that he does consider big is lifting the restriction that blocked Silverlight applications for Windows Phone from using software libraries created with Microsoft's game development toolset, XNA Studio. Access to the XNA portfolio "gives applications the ability to do incredible things with the UI that were before isolated in the realm of XNA games," Hoffman says. "I'm in effect excited to see the kinds of things developers start using with this new hybrid research."

Caughey says this is her top new feature in Mango. "I know some Windows Phone developers don't seem to care about this feature," she says. "However since my background is in building enterprise apps, I found I was limited in Windows Phone 7.0 to creating [only] apps that didn't need to quickly access loads of data on the device."

The local database "is an interesting object database approach to storing rich schema of related objects in a backing database on the phone," Wigley says.

The database can be accessed via familiar Microsoft coding conventions like .Net Language-Integrated Query, a general purpose query capability that's an integrated feature of the developer's main programming languages,. LINQ can be applied to all sources of information, including relational and XML. [Click here for background on .Net and LINQ and click here for information and tutorials on LINQ related to Windows Phone.]

"I've waited to move my mobile enterprise apps to Windows Phone because some users need the ability to quickly validate [whether] a given point-of-sale customer is entitled to free service - one [customer] out of tens of thousands," Caughey says. "You need a real database to do that in the amount of time users are willing to wait for the answer."

Last year, Windows Phone introduced the idea of Live Tiles or on-screen blocks representing an app or service and capable of displaying real-time information, just as the number of unread emails in your inbox.

The relationship between the OS

Mango deepens the relationship between the OS, apps, and Microsoft's Bing search engine. A Bing search for a movie can find theater locations and show times; App Connect brings an array of related information and apps, just as the IMDB.com app to find the latest movie trailer, and Fandango to buy tickets; and even show related apps on the Zune Windows Marketplace catalog.

"The Windows Phone 7 search [capability] is on the whole, in my view, one of the biggest differentiating factors with iOS," Hoffman says.

In Mango, Microsoft is releasing controlled support for "multitasking" - in substance controlled background processing and scheduling, through what it calls Background Agents.

At its MIX11 developer conference before this year, Microsoft told developers that Background agents will work within strict resource limits to preserve the Windows Phone user experience: agents can have no more than 10% of the CPU and just 5MB of memory. Agent processes are scheduled to preserve battery life, for instance running no more than 15 seconds every 30 minutes to check into a social network's location service.

Lot of tweaks that make interactions faster

Mango offers a lot of tweaks that make interactions faster, smoother or both, Caughey says. "Fast app switching [is one,] so users don't always get that Resuming screen when returning to your app," she says. Better memory management means that even existing Windows Phone 7 apps "run faster and consume less memory on Mango." After all, Mango shifts "touch" off the UI thread, "so scrolling performance is smoother," Caughey says.

The developers are more divided on the programming impact of Microsoft's decision to release with Mango a mobile version of its most advanced Web browser, Internet Explorer 9. IE9 will leverage the Windows Phone graphics processor and supports the emerging HTML5 standards. HTML5 brings new capabilities that let browser applications behave more like native applications, just as being able to cache data locally, for instance.

"I want my apps to feel like they belong on the phone," Hoffman says. "For this, there's no substitute for building a native application."

"Together, they have a subset of their company that needs occasionally disconnected capability, and they plan to create normal Windows Phone apps for those users as so then as provide them with the Windows Phones," Caughey says.

But for end users, Caughey has no doubts about the value of IE9. "A great Web browser is always a plus on a phone," she says. "I find I carry my laptop with me less and less as I am able to rely on my phone for more of my needs during I'm traveling."