Real World .NET 4, C#, and Silverlight®: Indispensible Experiences from 15 MVPs

8

Windows Phone “Mango” for Silverlight Developers

by Alex Golesh

Microsoft Windows Phone 7 brought great opportunities to the mobile developers' community by introducing two familiar development frameworks to the mobile world — Silverlight and XNA. However, the first version of Windows Phone left developers with some unsupported scenarios, and the platform did not support some wanted features. The next version of the Windows Phone operating system, codenamed “Mango,” addresses the most popular requests, and even some completely new scenarios, while improving the developer experience.

This chapter familiarizes you with Windows Phone, codenamed Mango (referred to simply as Mango throughout this chapter), by examining the hardware foundation, the software foundation, the application model, and the integration service.

HARDWARE FOUNDATION

As announced by Microsoft, all Windows Phone 7 devices will be supported by Mango. Also, the newer generation of Windows Phone devices will support additional hardware components, such as the gyroscope sensor and a new system on chip (SoC). To support the new hardware components and improve usage scenarios for existing components, the Mango release adds several new APIs.

Let's take a closer look at two important new APIs: the Camera API and the Sensors API.

Camera API

With the Mango release, developers can access a live camera feed, which enables some interesting scenarios (such as augmented reality applications, live image processing, and others). ...