Break with the Past, Bright New Future: Windows Phone Application Development Platform built on XNA and Silverlight

Went down to San Francisco yesterday to attend a dinner where Charlie Kindle walked a few industry folks around how we approached building Windows Phone, as well as some of the ramifications for software development that fall out of that. Although I’ll point you to Charlie’s blog for some more thoughts, the big thing I want to highlight is that we’ve stepped into a brave new world. Windows Phone was built from the ground up with a focus on the end-user experience, and this focus gave us the opportunity to revisit every aspect of the Windows Phone platform, from hardware, software, and services to the applications platform partners would be able to use to develop apps. That said, stepping into this brave new world also requires change – and it’s significant. To quote Charlie:

For us, the cost of going from good to great is a clean break from the past. To enable the fantastic user experiences you’ve seen in the Windows Phone 7 Series demos so far we’ve had to break from the past. To meet the goals above we’ve had to change how phone apps were written. As a result previous Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series.

The expertise and familiarity with our tools is not lost. If you are a .NET developer today your skills and much of your code will move forward. If you are Silverlight or XNA developer today you’re gonna be really happy.

As we move into a connected, cloud-based world, partners have asked us for ways to more easily reuse their code and leverage that work across all of the connected platforms they’re now being asked to support. From the games perspective, partners are thinking about how to build and create games for consoles, the PC, web browsers, and mobile devices such as Zune and now Windows Phone. They’re looking to deploy their apps across all of these platforms, with as little additional work as possible to do so (such as UI or interface changes between platforms). To enable this we decided to break away from the past and focus on a few, core, well-established development platforms that deliver on that ask. Over the last few years we took steps in this direction by enabling the XNA Framework on the Xbox 360, PC, and Zune. Today we announced that we’re also extending the XNA Framework to Windows Phone, as well as enabling Silverlight application development.

We will be talking more about how to use the XNA Framework for games at GDC next week, and we will go into much more depth on both the XNA Framework and Silverlight the following week at MIX in Las Vegas. If you have any interest in developing applications for Windows Phone 7 Series devices, I strongly encourage you to attend MIX. In addition, keep an eye on the following blogs for additional details in the coming weeks:

• Michael Klucher – XNA Game Development and Design
• Shawn Hargreaves – XNA Coding and Optimization
• Anad Iyer – Silverlight Application Development
• Christian Schormann – Silverlight and Tools

I’ll be at GDC all next week, and then heading to Vegas for MIX the week afterward. Please let me know if you’re attending – love to meet up with some of you and get your thoughts!

Related posts:

1. Want to Make Games for Windows Phone? Go to GDC!
2. Windows Phone 7 Series at GDC
3. How Do I Use Xbox LIVE APIs on Windows Phone?
4. Wired on Microsoft’s Challenge for Windows Phone 7: Wooing Developers
5. TechCrunch: The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps