Here’s a nice post from pocketnow.com explaining the debated layout of the Windows Phone 7 home screen and why it has blank spots on the right side of the screen.

Read the full article here: http://pocketnow.com/windows-phone/divine-proportions-why-the-start-page-has-a-big-blank-space-on-the-side

Nice promo video showing off Xbox live on the upcoming Windows Phone 7

As of 9th of July the Windows Phone 7 development tools are out of CTP and entered it’s final stage before release, Beta. There’s a lot of news and features.

One of the tings available now is the Windows Phone 7 application certification requirements. You now have a full overview of the requirements and tests your application needs to pass to be allowed submission into the Microsoft Marketplace.

Expression Blend 4 for Windows phone is now integrated into the beta tools install.

As we are getting ready for launch of developer and consumer devices there’s a new registration tool for development devices. Continue Reading

Today i received an e-mail from the Microsoft MVP Award program congratulating me with the MVP Award 2010 for Device Application Development.

I am stoked and very happy to receive this award, and it’ll be a great inspiration for me in my continued work for mobility in communities and professionally. As I am the first MVP on Device Application Development in Norway I hope we’ll be able to use this in our effort to make the Windows Phone Developer Community grow even further.

A big thank you goes to former Microsoft Norway Community Manager Rune Grothaug!

Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet has written a good article titled “Microsoft builds a Windows Phone 7 developer platform, but will the coders come?”.

She randomly picked three developers that she follow on Twitter that do mobility development asking if they could answer a few questions.  Developer Kelly Sommers expresses best what I would have answered  to these questions myself. All three of them gives good and thoughtful input.

Read the whole article here: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-builds-a-windows-phone-7-developer-platform-but-will-the-coders-come/6661 Continue Reading

On June 17. 2010 Microsoft announced their roadmap for the new and improved Microsoft Windows Embedded platform, suited for LOB (Line of Business) type of devices and applications.

One of the major changes from the earlier versions from a developer perspective is the upgrade from the Windows CE 5.x kernel to the 6.0 kernel, which now can handle more than 32,000 simultaneous processes. A huge improvement from the 32 processes the previous 5.x could handle. Each of the 32,000 processes has a upper limit of 2GB of virtual memory space, in 5.x you had 32MB…. Windows Embedded 7 will also support touch, gestures and Silverlight, something that improve the UI and UX capabilities immensely.

he full set of features for Windows Embedded can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsembedded/ce/dd630616.aspx and “What’s new in CE 6.0″ can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa924105.aspx

Windows Embedded will come in 6 base flavors and below  is a short description of each copied from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/products/default.mspx. Continue Reading

From the bag-o-goodies that the 2010 NDC conference agenda provides, it’s been a real challenge to pick sessions.

I hope for post conference video release of all sessions like they did last year. It will certainly bring some piece of mind thinking of all the sessions i’ll miss out on.

I´ve already posted my first day and second day agenda and it´s now time to pick my top selection for the third day. Day three will mostly be filled with the hotshots of software development and agility

9:00 – 10:00: The three laws of TDD with Robert C. Martin Continue Reading

While we are waiting for the full release of Windows Phone 7 Series, with devices, Marketplace and applications; Android based phones continues to grow and has passed Microsoft and Windows Mobile in the global device market.

A Gartner report released on may 19. shows that Android is the quickest growing mobile operating systems.

The report looks at the global market and market shares in 1Q of 2009 and 2010 and shows that the market leader Symbian is down 4,5% and has now 44,3% share of the market , RIM (Research In Motion blackberry) is the second largest OS with 19,4% share, but is down by 1,2%. Apple is up 4,9% to a 15,4% share  and Android is up 8% to a 9,5%.

The old Windows Mobile OS from Microsoft is down 3,4% to a market share of 6,8%. Continue Reading

Microsoft has released a Windows Phone training kit available for online viewing or offline download through Channel 9, to help developers jumpstart development of Windows Phone applications and games.

This release includes Windows Phone MIX10 videos as well as one new lab. Due to the limited nature of this release, which focused on getting the tools to work with VS2010 RTM, we managed to introduce only one new lab – Using Push Notifications. This lab features an end-2-end scenario for a simple weather application that register to receive Push Notifications as well as a WPF client application that mimics the 3rd party backend server.

Visit the Windows Phone Developer blog to read more about the contents of the kit.

Two weeks ago I compiled my agenda for the first day of Norwegian Developer Conference 2010. A killer conference day, but as a mobility developer the real goodies begins on day two. Here´s what i plan to attend:

Check out my first day agenda here.

9:00 – 10:00: Silverlight for Windows Phone  with Tim Heuer

Windows Phone 7 Series is coming…and if you are a Silverlight developer there is good news: Silverlight *is* the development platform for Windows Phone applications. Continue Reading