Windows Phone 7

One Thought: Welcome to a new Era of mobile development.

I'm going to keep this short and sweet. About 6 months ago I blogged for Macadamian that I thought WP7 was the platform to pick once they ironed out some of their SDK problems. Well with the recent launch of the WP7 being a near total success with MS putting many of the critics to bed. I'm calling it now. WP7 is going to rock.

I've gotten a chance to develop on the big two platforms (Android and iPhone) as well as WP7 and I know that WP7 is a pleasure, esspecially compared to iPhone dev. Hardcore dev's might not like that it's Silverlight only... However, it works. And it works well. MS areeven giving away their tools to build WP7 apps for free.

But what I really want to talk about is why WP7 is going to rock. A few reasons:

The Dev Tools rock, Silverlight and XNA as dev/game frameworks is brilliant and easy.

Expression Blend 4 is great at getting designers into the solution (see my cross canada presentation for Tech Days on this subject). Seriously, my Android developers wish that something like Blend existed for Android.

Yet there is another key piece.

The Hub. Yup - the panarama control. This is a game changer. It brings a level of navigation that UX people have been only dreaming would find it's way into a mobile platform. The hub officially brings to WP7 two ways to navigate the phone that map easily to UX information architecture patterns.

I don't think that MS knows where designers and UX teams are going take these concepts. But I'm excited to find out. You should be too.