Futurecat - Michael Karek

Today is the day that the Windows Phone team has been driving towards, and we’re very excited to say that we’ve reached the biggest milestone for our internal team – the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows Phone 7!  While the final integration of Windows Phone 7 with our partners’ hardware, software, and networks is underway, the work of our internal engineering team is largely complete. 

Windows Phone 7 is the most thoroughly tested mobile platform Microsoft has ever released.  We had nearly ten thousand devices running automated tests daily, over a half million hours of active self-hosting use, over three and a half million hours of stress test passes, and eight and a half million hours of fully automated test passes.  We’ve had thousands of independent software vendors and early adopters testing our software and giving us great feedback. We are ready.

I last posted on this blog when we reached the Technical Preview milestone, and we’ve received some great feedback since then which we’ve been able to respond to and improve the smart design throughout the OS. For example, folks loved the Facebook integration in the People Hub, but they also wanted ways to filter their contacts so only the Facebook friends they really know will show up in their contact list  – we’ve added support for that.  We’ve also made it easy to “like” a post right from the People Hub, or quickly post a message to someone’s Facebook wall directly.

This has been one of the most incredible product development efforts I’ve ever been a part of. Today’s milestone is exciting not just because of what we’ll deliver to customers later this year, but how it sets us up for success over the long term in the mobile space… we’re really just getting started.

We reached today’s milestone because of the tremendous efforts of the entire team including our partners, early adopters, and independent software developers providing feedback.  I want to send a huge THANK YOU to this extended team– we couldn’t have done it without you!

Terry

This weekend, the Windows Phone 7 team will hit the big apple for the 6th annual BlogHer Conference at the Hilton New York. This year is the largest ever, with more than 2,400 female bloggers from around the world in attendance. The conference is the brainchild of the BlogHer Network, the largest community of women who blog, and we couldn’t be more excited!

We are, as they say, conference newbees, as this is our first year attending BlogHer. We will be at BlogHer showing off what Windows Phone 7 has to offer some of busiest women around and how they can use their mobile phone to make their lives simpler—and more fun! Personally, I am excited to learn from these women and show off the promise of Windows Phone 7.

Throughout the conference, we will host group demo sessions in our suite, Hilton room 4331. These Snack on 7 sessions are informal ways to swing by and get an idea of why Windows Phone 7 truly us different!

Snack on 7 Session Schedule

Friday, August 6:

• 10:30am, 1:30pm and 3:30pm

Saturday, August 7:

• 11am, 1:30pm, 3pm

We will also be in the BlogHer GeekLab, so you can drop by during the day to say hi and see Windows Phone 7 for yourself! While there, you can also check-in to the GeekLab on FourSquare!

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for the latest Windows Phone 7 updates from the conference. You can also connect with us on Facebook!

Get excited NYC and hope to see you soon!

For all you in the Seattle area, Windows Phone will join the Windows team and Zune tonight at GDGT Seattle at the Showbox SoDo from 7-10pm. We have participated in several of the GDGT events but it is safe to say we are most excited about this one since we are on the shores of Elliott Bay in our home town of Seattle. Swing by and say hello, get your eyes on Windows Phone 7 and tell us what you think! Also for the developers out there, check out Brandon Watson’s post this morning. Bring your Windows Phone 7 app to the event and see it deployed on a prototype device and you just might walk out of the room with a test device to take home and keep on coding! See you tonight!

@brianseitz

With the Windows Phone Developer Tools in Beta and Windows Phone 7 in Technical Preview, now is the time for you to build Windows Phone 7 apps in earnest. We have refreshed our developer documentation to help you build those apps, and we have two, new design-focused documents to help you make them look beautiful.

First up, the UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7 v2.0 has been updated from the ground up for beta. With additional information and a new layout we hope you will find more readable, this guide provides detailed information about UI elements and controls, UI system behaviors, and the interaction model for the touch interface based on the design system internally named Metro. Designers and developers should read this guide to learn about the dos and don’ts of UI implementations for their Windows Phone apps. We’ve made it easier to find specific guidance by putting it in bold in the right-hand column of each page.

Also available are the Design Templates for Windows Phone 7. These are a collection of 28 layered Photoshop template files and the Segoe WP font family that can be used to create pixel-perfect application layouts, to help guide UI development, or to pitch an idea. These design templates showcase many controls that are a part of the Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta. They also include examples of controls that are a part of Windows Phone, but are not available as a part of the Windows Phone Developer Tools.

Let us know what you think. If you have suggestions or feedback about these design resources, please email us at wp7des@microsoft.com and help spread the word – if you find these resources helpful, please tweet about them.

Are you in the Seattle area? Join us today from 7pm – 10pm at the Showbox SoDo for gdgt live in Seattle. This event, put on by the awesome folks at gdgt, is for anybody interesting in checking out some of the hottest new gadgets. We’re sponsoring the event and I’ll be there as well as several colleagues of mine to show off some pretty cool Windows PCs to do some demos of Windows 7, the new Windows Live products and services, and the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 3. Our friends from Windows Phone (@brianseitz) and Zune (@yegr) will also be there showing off their stuff too!

For more information about the gdgt live event in Seattle, click here for gdgt’s Seattle event page which includes a list of sponsors and a place to RSVP if you plan on coming.

What’s gdgt you ask? It’s a new kind of social network designed for people to come and create lists of gadgets they have either owned, want or currently have. You can become friends with people and see their gadget lists. You can check out my gdgt profile here which includes my lists.

I look forward to seeing folks tomorrow! I’ll be tweeting from the event with the #gdgtseattle hashtag (click here to follow me if you’re not already) and will publish another blog post later tonight after the event with photos and thoughts on the overall experience.

I’m very excited to share with this blog community, that our Windows Phone engineering team has hit a very meaningful milestone; one that we’re calling technical preview. We are certainly not done yet – but the craftsmen (and women) of our team have signed off that our software is now ready for the hands-on everyday use of a broad set of consumers around the world – and we’re looking forward to their feedback in the coming weeks, so that we can finish the best Windows Phone release ever together.

Before release of this milestone, the software has undergone extensive testing – in daily use by more than 1000 people at Microsoft who have been using WP7 as their only phone for the past several months, and the more than 10,000 devices in our test labs. We’ve been testing usability, battery life, network connectivity, and many other metrics for a long time. As a result of that work, I hope you will find the experience to be of surprisingly high quality.

Starting today, thousands of prototype phones from Asus, LG and Samsung are making their way into the hands of developers over the next few weeks. Combine that with the beta release of the Windows Phone developer tools, and I can’t wait to see how our developer partners take advantage of our new approach to smart design and integrated mobile experiences. I’m personally working on a flash card app for my daughter, and am consistently amazed by the ease with which Silverlight and Visual Studio make WP7 apps possible.

So we’re almost there – but there is much work left to do. Together, with our early adopter customers, developers, OEM, and mobile operator partners we are in the home stretch. We are on the path to do exactly what we set out to do – create a different take on mobile phone software, an experience we think many people will find fun and refreshing, with a quality bar that we’re proud of.

I look forward to celebrating the release of Windows Phone 7 with all of you,

Terry

CVP, Windows Phone Engineering

Sr. VP of our Mobile Communications Business, Andy Lees is in Washington, DC today showing thousands of Microsoft partners a line of consumer products and services that are truly connected with one another. He’s also showing off our own Windows Phone 7 and sharing a few updates on features and capabilities.

When we talk about connected entertainment, we’re talking about the ability to enjoy great experiences on whatever device or machine you’re using throughout the day, without needing an entirely different set of applications or credentials. For example, this holiday connected entertainment from Microsoft will span Windows 7 PCs, the Xbox 360 with Kinect and Windows Phone 7, coupled with services such as Xbox Live for games, Zune for music and video, Windows Live for email, calendars, pictures and services, and, of course, our decision engine: Bing.

My favorite product that features many of Microsoft’s new consumer technologies, for obvious reasons, is Windows Phone 7. It integrates experiences by consolidating common tasks and services around shared hubs that put the focus on what you want to do rather than putting the onus on you to move in and out of various apps. All the stuff you’d expect is right where you expect it – and that goes for content and services that live outside the phone.

So what does this look like in practice? Take search, or better yet, decision making. Bing comes built in, so just about wherever you go on your Windows Phone 7, search is only a button away. The Music + Videos hub draw upon the beautiful Zune software. Windows Phone 7 will connect with Zune software on the PC through Wi-Fi to access and manage music, video, high-resolution photos and other large file content. Similarly, the Games hub features Xbox Live and gamer content and a place for you to invite friends for a friendly – or not so friendly, depending on your preference – game. Windows Live integration is right where you’d expect it, in places like the People and Pictures hubs. When it’s time for some work, the Office hub brings together the powerful Office suite we all know and love: OneNote, Word, PowerPoint, and even SharePoint server integration. And, you can take advantage of the phone’s integration with Web based email and calendaring from Windows Live, Gmail and others, plus hosted Exchange accounts.

The Web is a great companion to just about any computing experience these days and today we’re talking a little more about some of the new services for Windows Phone 7 that tie the phone in your pocket up to the cloud. Through a push notification service that we’ve also extended to third party app developers, apps will be able to deliver real time updates. This way you know you’re getting the latest info at a glance, either as banner-style alerts or straight to the personalized live tiles on your phone’s Start screen. A feature we’re discussing for the first time today is the new Windows Phone Live companion site that gives people a central place to see pictures they’ve published, view their Windows Live calendar and contacts, exchange OneNote files and access other information shared between the phone and the Web. The site will offer25GB of SkyDrive and host the Find My Phone service, which allows people to find and manage a missing phone with map, ring, lock and erase capabilities right from your PC – and all for free.

Availability is becoming a hot topic as we get closer to the holiday timeframe we’ve committed to for delivering Windows Phone 7. We remain on track for that goal but also believe that launching Windows Phone 7 really is just one more big step along a new path – part of a course we’ve charted during a time when Smartphone sales are expected to double in the next four years alone according to some. This is a fresh start for Microsoft’s mobile efforts; one in which we put the end user experiences at the center of every decision we make, from architecting a new design and integrated on-phone experiences, to taking more accountability for the hardware and application development platform. We’ve implemented a more measured and structured philosophy to bringing phones to market so that customers have a great experience with the scenarios that matter most to them, thereby enabling us to establish a foundation for growth over the long term.

So what does this mean? We are working closely with our partners to determine exactly where and how Windows Phone 7 will be available regionally this holiday season and beyond. I’m happy to say that Windows Phone 7 will be well represented in countries around the world this holiday. During initial availability, Windows Phone 7 will support 5 languages; English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. The Windows Phone Marketplace will support the buying and selling of applications in 17 countries; Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, UK and United States.

The bottom line is that we believe it’s not enough to have exciting games, intuitive email, rich music, extensive social networking tools or even beautiful hardware to house it all. The magic comes when all of these things work together to bring the people and things you care about closer, while smoothing out your everyday tasks so that your day is a little bit easier. That’s what you’ll see from Microsoft this holiday; connected entertainment that’s bigger than any single screen.

I am pleased to announce that Intuit is developing an SDK for Windows Phone 7, making it easier for developers to write Windows Phone 7 applications that interface with the Intuit Partner Platform’s cloud services for businesses, including QuickBooks. This enables business professionals to access key data from a variety of Windows Phone 7 devices and easily view their cloud data hosted in Windows Azure.

Our work with Intuit further demonstrates the industry momentum for Windows Phone 7. Today’s announcement also extends the relationship we began with Intuit in January, when we announced that we were joining forces to deliver Web applications to millions of small businesses through the Intuit App Center via integration between the two companies cloud services platforms:  the Intuit Partner Platform and Windows Azure platform.

Both Microsoft and Intuit Partner Platform remain committed to providing developers from both companies additional opportunities for revenue and by enabling them to develop for the cloud and for Windows Phone 7 devices, while also reaching Intuit’s vast network of businesses, we are certainly meeting this goal. I look forward to this continued relationship with Intuit and am excited about future opportunities.

Today I’m at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington D.C., meeting with our partners and talking about the capabilities that Windows Phone 7 offers for creating mobile solutions and applications to help them grow their business.

I’m really energized by the conversations I’m having with partners at this year’s conference. I’m seeing some really exciting solutions coming together for Windows Phone 7 as partners from around the globe apply their unique skills to build compelling experiences for our mutual customers.

With a focus on end users, we designed an entirely different kind of phone experience and platform for partners to build on. Windows Phone 7 supports the needs of organizations in new ways and excels at a broad range of tasks that people do most frequently, which means it will be appealing to more people than previous versions. We incorporated software and services from across the company and integrated them into a rich set of experiences called hubs including People, Office, Marketplace, Pictures, Music and Video, and Games. Windows Phone 7 also delivers a powerful application platform for people to create compelling new experiences.

The net result is new opportunities for systems integrators and people creating applications to get into or to expand their businesses, such as:

• Creating compelling mobile solutions and services for businesses
• Providing unique experiences through mobile applications

In a session at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, I note that there is a billion dollar opportunity in smartphones. After the conference, you can access my presentation entitled “Windows Phone Partner Opportunity” on demand from Digital WPC.

If you’re interested in growing your mobile practice, here are the top things you can do.

Create Compelling Mobile Solutions and Services for Businesses

Businesses are progressively mobilizing their workforce to help them be more productive, creating opportunity for new services and solutions. Integration with popular Microsoft offerings like SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, Microsoft Office and Business Productivity Online Suite helps people communicate and collaborate through their smartphone, PC or the browser.

Windows Phone 7 uniquely enables collaboration through the SharePoint Workspace client, empowering people to download, edit and synchronize documents with their phone so that their teams always have a current document to work from. The overall services opportunity for Microsoft partners and developers with SharePoint is $5.6 billion today and will grow to over $6.7 billion in FY12. With SharePoint Workspace client and a rich Office hub experience that includes access to the mobile versions of OneNote, PowerPoint, Excel and Word for viewing and editing documents, Windows Phone 7 offers a unique way for partners to deliver value to their customers and to grow their services business.

Windows Phone 7 was also designed to help organizations make the most efficient use of resources by enabling IT departments to use familiar tools and existing infrastructure to manage phones and to help meet corporate security and management needs.

Provide Unique Experiences Through Mobile Applications

We’ve invested heavily to deliver a significant step forward for developers and designers, with a new application platform, world-class tools, and an application store, the Windows Phone Marketplace. This system enables the quick and efficient creation of compelling applications and easy distribution to every Windows Phone 7 user.

People creating applications for Windows Phone 7 have access to a powerful and familiar arsenal of tools–Silverlight, the XNA Framework, Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend. These tools, combined with a strong set of web services enable quick and efficient development of compelling experiences for business and consumer use that can easily be extended from the phone to any screen. Best of all, these powerful tools are available free of charge, reducing development costs and making it an even more compelling proposition.

Today we announced the immediate availability of the beta version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools, which include all the tools necessary to start building new experiences now. Applications built with the beta version of the tools will be near ready to submit to the Windows Phone Marketplace. The tools will RTM later this summer, at which time final touches could be added with components announced previously such as Maps, Pivot or Panorama control. More information about the beta tools can be found here.

Aside from providing a great set of tools, the new design and integrated experiences in Windows Phone 7 provide an opportunity to create a fresh take on business applications—with richness on the client combined with the power of the cloud. The following picture is what a custom Silverlight-based productivity application might look like on Windows Phone 7. With a swipe, the user could switch between “Dashboard”, “Sales” and “Marketing” to access up to date business information.

All of these great applications will be delivered through the Windows Phone Marketplace, enabling partners to sell or distribute directly to customers. A clear advantage for developers and designers in the Windows Phone Marketplace is a structured yet open and transparent marketplace for applications. Additionally, we’ve recently lowered Marketplace fees, reduced administrative overhead and introduced private beta distribution for the better testing of applications.

We’re working closely with partners to help them learn more about the new Windows Phone 7. If you would like to get more information about opportunities with Windows Phone 7 or the Windows Phone Marketplace, you can find the latest resources at our web site: http://Partner.microsoft.com/windowsphone.

First things first: go get the Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta. It has arrived!

The term “Beta” is understood to mean that things are close to being finished.  Well, that’s what we mean anyway. This Beta release represents the near final version of the tools for building applications and games for Windows Phone 7. 

Since the initial CTP release of the tools just this March, the Windows Phone Developer Tool CTP has been widely embraced by the community, and they have shown what’s possible on our new development platform.

It’s time to get serious about building the actual apps and games for Windows Phone 7 that consumers will be looking for starting this holiday season.

One of the things I really want to do is just take a step back and congratulate the entire Windows Phone 7 team.  They have done an amazing job of delivering code month after month on our path to releasing later this year.  Check out this timeline:

• Feb 2010 – Windows Phone 7 was unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona
• Mar 2010 – The application platform was unveiled at MIX 10 in Las Vegas.  With that, we had the first CTP of the Windows Phone Developer Tools.
• Apr 2010 – The tools received an updated, and the CTP Refresh shipped.
• Jun 2010 – Windows Phone Marketplace details unveiled at TechEd 2010.  Get the Windows Phone 7 Application Certification Requirements.
• July 2010 – Beta release of Windows Phone Developer Tools, and the preview developer phones start shipping to ISVs

Whew! The Windows Phone engineering team has been crushing it.

Here’s a link to the release notes for the beta, but I wanted to talk about a few top level items:

• Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone – Blend is now integrated completely into the Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta.
• Developer Registration Utility – Now you can unlock you Windows Phone 7 device for development purposes.
• XAP Deployment Tool – if you want to deploy XAP files directly to an unlocked device, now you can.
• The Windows Phone 7 API – we’re getting close to completion.  Many namespaces that were previously distributed over several different DLLs have now been consolidated into one.  In addition, there have been realignments and changes in several other namespaces as well.  Push Notifications, Accelerometer and App Bar APIs have all been updated.
• Additional Controls – There are some additional controls coming in the next few weeks (i.e. Panorama and Pivot) which didn’t make the beta release.  They are coming soon.
• Control Templates – Silverlight for Windows Phone control templates have been updated to match evolutions in the overall OS.

Get Trained – Windows Phone 7 Jump Start

Windows Phone 7 JumpStart is a FREE virtual live class for developers interested in developing applications and games for Windows Phone 7.  We’re providing this in partnership with our MS Learning team. The course is organized into four virtual instructor-led sessions that are of 3-hour duration.  They will be presented by forthcoming MS Press authors and MVP’s, Andy Wigley and Rob Miles. It will provide developers a jump start for developing Windows Phone 7 applications.  The Labs will be completed offline with office hours access to the instructors.

The dates for these course sessions are:

• July 20 – 8am: Session One: Getting Started with Microsoft Windows Phone and Silverlight
• July 20 – 1pm: Session Two: Programming Game Applications with XNA
• July 22 – 8am: Session Three:  Programming Applications with Silverlight
• July 22 – 1pm: Session Four:  Review and Wrap Up

Go register for the course now!

Devices for Developers

We made a promise last month that we would be getting pre-production preview devices to developers this month. We are keeping that promise. In fact, the very first preview devices were awarded last week to a pair of pretty amazing high-school students who won the Windows Phone “Rockstar” contest as part of the Imagine Cup. When we saw what they had done, we knew we had to get them preview phones.

Starting next Monday (July 19th), we start shipping the devices more broadly. Sadly, we will not be able to meet all of that demand.  We are planning to set up deploy and test labs in major cities to make it a little easier for everyone who wants to have access to a preview phone to have it. More on that soon.

Lastly, to get your name in the queue, assuming you haven’t already sent in an email, you can now send an email to wp7req@microsoft.com.  A field representative will get back to you as soon as possible. Again, these are preview phones, so they are limited in quantity. When you send email, please include the following information:

• Your name
• Company name, if applicable
• What city/state/country you are located in
• App(s) you plan on developing (category and brief description)

Twitter

At some point, we had to mention Twitter, right? We strongly encourage developers establish a connection with their local field evangelist, since they will be the ones ultimately putting phones into the hands of developers, but they can also point you in the right direction for solving problems, get you connected to other partners, and generally help out. To make it easier to get to know your local evangelist, we’ve set up this list – wp7dev/champs (http://twitter.com/wp7dev/champs).

You can also follow other members of the team based on their area of coverage:

• @ckindel – WP7 Dev Platform
• @ai – Mobile Social Media
• @brandonwatson – Marketplace & Platform
• @cschormann – Silverlight & Blend (UPDATED: Fixed incorrect spelling/link)
• @mklucher – Gaming & XNA
• @ozymandias – Gaming
• @shawnhargreaves – Game Design

In Closing

This is a big milestone for everyone involved in Windows Phone 7 – inside and outside of Microsoft – and we hope you share in our excitement. With the Beta release of the tools, developers can build apps with a “ship it” mentality. There have already been so many amazing apps shown running on the emulator, and a lucky few who have been able to deploy to the phones at our developer events. We’re blown away by the early look at the apps, all of the sharing in the community, the blogging, and the screenshots. There’s a huge team of people here in Redmond who are all watching for new content tagged with “wp7dev” or “Windows Phone 7 Development.” It’s not uncommon for links to get passed around with a “wow, check out what these guys did!”  Keep it up, and keep the faith.