Next Windows Phone with New Features for Developers

On Wednesday, during the MIX11 conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced the upcoming availability of a new flavor of its Windows Phone platform this fall, codenamed Mango, and also a wide range of new features that would be available for application developers.

This fall, the next version of Windows Phone will deliver hardware-accelerated IE9 with HTML5, along with multitasking, Twitter integration in the People hub, and more. It would also offer access to new resources for app builders supporting the platform.

During his keynote at the conference, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Mobile, Joe Belfiore, announced some of these features, and presented the new opportunities that the company is opening for software developers.

Moreover, he announced that a new set of Windows Phone Developer Tools would become available for download as soon as next month, bringing forth access to options that developers have been long asking for.

The new capabilities that are coming to developers with the new tools would include:

- Live Agents create superior customer engagement with real-time interactions via Live Tiles, Push Notifications, Deep Linking and Background Agents. Multitasking is also enhanced to allow for fast applications switching, as well as background audio and file transfer.

- Phone integration has been greatly improved for developers wanting to do more with their apps. The Live Tiles functionality has been expanded to give developers more flexibility and engage with their customers better.

- Developers will have access to the Motion Sensor library and the camera, enabling augmented reality experiences. The integration extends deeper into the operating system via sockets and database access now available to apps and games.

The new Windows Phone Developer Tools, set to become available for download in May, would also come with a new profiler and emulator for testing, along with support for both Silverlight and XNA in the same project, access to SQL database, as well as access to calendar and contacts through apps.

Microsoft also noted that the newly formed alliance with Nokia is expected to help the Windows Phone ecosystem a lot. “Now we are incredibly excited about what our alliance with Nokia means for our mutual developers and the long term potential of our shared ecosystem,” a recent post on the Windows Phone Developer blog reads.