WP7 is the Microsoft implementation of the whole mobile concept from Apple. Mobile Market is equivalent of AppStore, Zune have the same role as iTunes to sync the device and basic apps are about the same, except they are based on Microsoft technology, for example Internet Explorer replace Safari, Bing map and search replaces Google. A light version of Office and SharePoint may be free on the phone for the release. XboxLive will be the basis for all games on the device. Interesting fact, IE doesn't ship with Flash plugin. Seems that Microsoft agree with Apple on this point.
Concerning the interface, it uses the design pattern Hub and Spoke, that force the user to focus on one task at a time. A tile view of apps acts as the Hub. There are three mandatory physical button on the phone itself: back, start and search. Back goes to the previous view, start goes to the tile view and the search go to Bing. There can't multi-process running simultaneously, the same as the iPhone before multitasking. Say that you start an app, then go to the tile view and start another app, the first app instance is lost.
You can use two different libraries for an app, Silverlight for straight forward forms or XNA for games that requires more heavy video display. We saw mainly how to use Silverlight to design the UI. The application code can be written in C#, using the .NET framework classes. What is realy interesting is the clear separation between the logic and display of the application. It has been thought in such a way that the designer can work on the view independently of the programmer, that fills the view. Some preview data can be supplied to the view at design time, so the designer doesn't need the whole application to work. The UI is completely defined in XAML file in a declarative manner. A factory then read the file at runtime and create corresponding objects. .NET library provides a high level of abstraction for XML handling, HTTP and SQL queries, so in very few lines of code, a lot of things occur.
For those of you who may want to give it a try, here are some notes about installation on a MacBook Pro 1,1. The requirement and installation instructions are accurate. You need the VMX extension for virtualization to get good performances. It has to be enabled into EFI boot loader. See the Parallels knowledge base to get instructions. Microsoft supplies a small utility to check if the extension is available. But, maybe more critical is this MacBook Pro have an ATI X1600 card, and the latest (and the last) driver from AMD doesn't support WDDM 1.1, which is required for decent display performance with the phone emulator. Any computer with proper drivers for Windows 7 should do, it just means I will need a new computer to run the emulator appropriately.
In conclusion, Microsoft is jumping in the arena seriously with WP7. SDK is quite lean yet, and this is a great piece of integrated technology AFAIK. Their first step is obviously to copy recipies of competitors with their own technology. It's right, because innovation comes a lot from inspiration from others. iPhone is still the blue ocean device, and except for the Office app, there is nothing that a WP7 seems to do better, so the price point must be somewhat attractive to change the market forces. The fate of WP7 is now in the hand of customers.
