SDK overview

So what’s new in the SDK? Well the most important change that was already announced before this SDK is the merge with the Windows 8 kernel. Because of this the foundation where Windows Phone 7 was built on was replaced by WinRT. In Windows Phone 8 you’ll have access to a subset of the full Windows 8 WinRT and it’s currently called WinPRT. (Don’t know if that will be the official name). The WinPRT contains a subset of the Windows 8 WinRT APIs and also contains a set of new APIs that are only used for phone specific features.

Application Platform & .net framework

It’s now possible to build native applications in C++ and you can also use Direct3D to create 3d graphics on Windows Phone. Javascript and HTML however are not included in the SDK and I don’t know if Microsoft has any plans to add this in the future either.

If you just want to port your Windows Phone 7.5 app to Windows Phone 8 it’s not that much work. A few namespaces have changed so you might have to replace the namespace of these controls. The controls that were moved by Microsoft are the Pivot and the Panorama controls because Microsoft wanted to improve their performance. The LongListSelector is also moved from the Silverlight Toolkit to the SDK itself. Existing Windows Phone 7.5 apps will also run on Windows Phone 8 devices so your existing apps will all keep working on the new devices that will be released.

The new .net framework 4.5 and C# 5.0 language also add new features that are really useful when building apps. Some examples are the new async and await keywords and serialization features for JSON files. More on these new features at day 5.

Tiles and notifications

The new home screen of Windows Phone 8 with the 3 sizes of tiles also needs changes to the API to support this of course. It is now possible to set more texts and images on your tiles which will be used in the different size scenarios. A great addition is that you can also add notifications of your tiles to the lockscreen. In Windows Phone 7.5 it was only possible to see updates on your lockscreen for missed calls, text messages or emails but now you can set up to 5 different apps to have notifications on the lockscreen. It’s also possible to add a text notification to the lockscreen like in Windows Phone 7.5 the Agenda did. The user can select 1 application that is allowed to show it’s notifications there in text. The data of the count on the lockscreen and the text notification on the lockscreen are pulled from the data of the main Tile so you only have to set this to use these new features. More information and examples will be posted in tomorrow’s post that is completely dedicated to these features.

Multi-resolution

Microsoft also announced earlier that there will be multiple resolutions available on the phones. The 3 available resolutions are: 480X800 (WVGA), 768X1280 (WXGA) and 720×1280 (720P). Both WVGA and WXGA are in a 15:9 ratio where 720P is 16:9 Ratio. Every app will always work on each phone. You can make your UI a bit flexible so that for example listboxes will fill the extra screen space that is available on the 16:9 ratio. If you don’t change anything to your existing design the app will still work but will show a bit of empty space below the app. On day 3 we’ll dive deeper in how to build a flexible UI with these new screen resolutions.

Maps

Microsoft replaced the old Bing maps by Nokia maps. New features of these maps are that you can use the system launchers to download a piece of map through the MapDownloaderTask and you can also use the MapsDirectionTask to get directions to a location on the map. You can also launch the Maps application by a MapTask Launcher.

Speech

Speech and voice commands are one of the coolest things in the SDK in my opinion. With the new features in the SDK you can start your app by saying commands like “Start MyApp, go to ThisPage”. You can also add a list of available commands which people will hear when they hold the Windows button and say “What can i say?”.

Wallet & In-app Purchases

The wallet gives Windows Phone users a place where they can collect coupons, credit card and payment info and accounts, Memberships and loyalty cards. By adding a few capabilities in your manifest (So the user knows you’re going to use the wallet) you can extend the wallet with your apps. You can add/ read update or delete wallet items. (you can only change items linked to your app, so it’s not possible to steal someones credit card info for example). This feature will need to prove itself in the future if it is going to be used a lot or not. One other feature I know for sure will be used a lot are in app purchases. This feature finally gives you the possibility to charge your users for features in an app so the business models on making money are being extended by a lot. examples of this are: buying extra levels for a game. buy a month subscription to a newspaper app etc.

Proximity

NFC is one of the features in Windows Phone that are highly anticipated by all the users. It’s possibilities are endless and i’m really curious of what developers are going to use it for. All currently announced phones have NFC capabilities so only time will tell. More on this on day 7.

Data Sense

Data sense is a new feature in Windows Phone 8 that allows users to keep track of their data plan. The api also allows developers to support their users by adapting data usage in their apps by checking if the user is on a data plan or not. It can also check if the user exceeded his data plan or is near  exceeding it and because of that it can disable (or ask the user to disable) certain parts of the app that use a lot of data.

Simulation dashboard

Some scenarios are always hard to test without a real device or even when you have a device simulating scenarios like low bandwidth or poor phone signal are nearly impossible to test even though chances are high actual users will run into these scenarios and they might break your app. Microsoft came with a really cool solution to this for Windows Phone 8 and it’s called the Simulation dashboard that is available in Visual Studio 2012. From the Simulation dashboard you can change the bandwidth or signal quality, throw interruptions like getting a call or a notification popup while your app is playing and you can even make the emulator jump to the lock screen to test if everything keeps working when you apps need to keep running under the lockscreen. At day 4 we’ll dive deeper in the possibilities of the new emulator and the simulation dashboard.

Globalization

Globalization and localization support was already quite good in Windows Phone 7.5 but now with Windows Phone 8 available in 180+ countries and 50+ languages Microsoft added support for apps to read from right to left which is common in certain languages. I don’t know if a lot of people are going to use these new globalization features but it is nice to mention it’s available.

That was my quick overview of the SDK. From tomorrow on we’ll dive deeper in the SDK with code samples and more details. What will be discussed in the next blog posts of this series:

Hopefully you’ll be back tomorrow for the next post in this series!

Geert van der Cruijsen