Althought not meant to be officially released until Mix 2010, details of the Windows Phone Application Platform have already been leaked.
Application Platform Components
The core components of the application platform will be Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend. The Windows phone emulator is a Visual Studio addin which will enable VS to emulate the Win Phone on the local PC.
There are two frameworks available for development on the Windows Phone OS:
- Silverlight
- XNA for development of games (this is the same language used to develop ZuneHD games and XBOX LIVE games).
The document also confirmed that the forthcoming Win Phone will have cloud access so there is likely to be an API for connecting to Windows Azure Storage as well as Windows Live.
As with Silverlight, apps will run in a sandbox and Microsoft highlighted that there will be two levels of API’s – a native API which developers will have restricted access to and a more basic set of API’s that will be available for all applicatons.