“Microsoft is making improvements to its Bing search engine to surface answers more quickly for its users in the hope of helping them make purchasing decisions. Microsoft demonstrated these changes at the Search Engine Strategies show in New York March 25, showing Bing on a Windows Phone 7 Series device and a real-time integration with location-sharing service Foursquare. The new features are the latest move in the company’s broad effort to gain more market share from Google and Yahoo.”
Tag Archives: Windows Mobile 7
Current Windows Mobile apps won’t run on Windows Phone 7
It seems that existing Windows Mobile applications will unfortunately be incompatible with Windows Mobile 7 phones.
Microsoft Partner Group Program Manager for the Windows Phone Application Platform & Developer Experience, Charlie Kindel, had the following to say:
“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 deliver what developers expect in the developer platform we’ve had to change how phone apps were written. One result of this is previous Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series.”
No Native Code Development on Windows Phone 7
“Windows Phone 7 is a managed code platform, we’ve been told at Mix10 in Las Vegas. Development is via Silverlight or XNA; there is no native API.
Of course there is a native API; the question is more about what code is allowed to access it. Still, in the press briefing the spokesman was clear that native code development will not be supported.”
SharePoint 2010 and Windows Phone 7 Applications
SharePoint on your mobile. SharePoint on your mobile. SharePoint on your mobile.
No, the first paragraph of this post is not an error. I want to highlight this. Why would you ask? Well, in my experience this wonderful “semi built-in” capability of SharePoint is so often overlooked. What do we need to do to get customers excited about it? How do we sell it better?
Well for starters, I believe there needs to be much bigger uptake within the community (specifically South Africa) around creating prepackaged style sheets for mobile views and so forth. In my world, a better overall understanding of said component will culminate in more chatter and excitement which inevitable transfers to our clients.
So where to from here?
Enter SharePoint 2010 and Windows Phone 7
I caught an article by Jan Tielens on a “retweet” from a friend @Veronique and was amazed at how pretty the content is displayed. With previous versions of SharePoint on the phone kind of posts, I always thought it was nice, but not practical. This article demonstrates not only a wonderful solution, but something I honestly believe would add an immense amount of value to clients. Let’s hope it’s fairly simple to deploy.
SharePoint on Windows Phone 7
The screenshot above illustrates how announcements are displayed and accessed via the mobile phone. This makes me SO excited as you can obviously extend this to any list within SharePoint. Then, “oh don’t get me started as there are unlimited possibilities” imagine the power of creating an SharePoint External List and allowing users to access that via their phone.
Boom!!! Line of business data on your mobile phone while utilizing SharePoint’s permissions / audit trails et al. Mobile development is not our core competence right now, but after viewing what is possible I will certainly start being more vocal about the possibilities to our clients.
You can read Jan’s full article here – http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2010/03/17/my-first-windows-phone-7-app-getting-sharepoint-content.aspx
RSS in Windows Mobile 7?
Well, I haven’t come across any specific mention of RSS in Windows Mobile 7 yet so this is purely speculation, but if the below image is anything to go by then it looks like we’ll be able to receive RSS feeds directly on the home screen.
I’ve always wanted to be able to receive RSS feeds on my HTC Tytn II without having to use a separate RSS reader application. Maybe similar to the way the weather component in the HTC Homeplug works:
I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see 
Windows Mobile 7
News of Windows Mobile 7 may be old, but I’ve only just come across it so I had to write a post. I love Windows Mobile.
Here’s an article detailing the features in WM7, and here are some screenshots:
