14 DAY TRIAL // Redmond-based software giant Microsoft has just made available for download for Windows Phone 7 developers a new tool that would further enhance the capabilities of the platform, namely the Windows Phone 7 + Cloud Services Software Development Kit (SDK).
The new development tool builds on the so called Project Hawaii, an initiative through which cloud services are expected to be used for improving the experience Windows Phone 7 devices can offer to their users.
Currently, the SDK is only a dev preview, but the team behind it is reportedly working on adding more functionality to it in the near future, and might release another flavor of the tool before the end of February.
“This is a software-development kit (SDK) for the creation of Windows Phone 7 (WP7) applications that leverage research services not yet available to the general public,” a post on Microsoft Research reads.
“The primary goal of this SDK is to support the efforts of Project Hawaii, a student-focused initiative for exploration of how cloud-based services can be used to enhance the WP7 experience.”
The first release of the SDK is arriving with two services, namely Relay and Rendezvous, and should add more in the February iteration, such as Speech to Text, or OCR in the Cloud.
The Relay Service was meant to offer direct communication between devices, through going around the limitations set in place by services providers that do not offer public IP addresses for their mobile phones.
“The Hawaii Relay Service provides a relay point in the cloud that mobile applications can use to communicate. It provides an endpoint naming scheme and buffering for messages sent between endpoints. It also allows for messages to be multicast to multiple endpoints,” the service is described.
Here's what Microsoft Research notes on the Rendezvous Service: “[it] is a mapping service from well-known human-readable names to endpoints in the Hawaii Relay Service. These well-known human-readable names may be used as stable rendezvous points that can be compiled into applications.”
The dev preview of Windows Phone 7 + Cloud Services Software Development Kit (SDK) from Project Hawaii was released last week, and can be downloaded from Softpedia as well, via this link.