An early access program allows developers to install Mango on their devices using the just released WP SDK 7.1 Beta2.
The Mango update of the Windows Phone (WP) 7 mobile OS announced in May is not publicly available but it can be downloaded by developers and flashed onto unlocked WP7 devices. For that, the developer or his/her company needs to have an account on App Hub and to install Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Beta2 (formerly known as WP Developer Tools). Unlike previous programs when they were fully prepared, Microsoft seems to be in a hurry with this Mango early access program which has some limitations: only one phone can be updated per developer and it works in only 23 countries. That is because the phone might become unusable upon upgrading it to Mango, and Microsoft promises to fix such phones once the distribution infrastructure is fully operational if it is in one of those countries.
Mango has a number of notable new features, which we covered in a previous post, such as mobile hardware-accelerated IE, multitasking, integrated communication, Silverlight 4 and XNA support, additional sensors, and VB.NET support.
WP SDK Beta 2 also comes with new tools: Isolated Storage Explorer plus profiler and emulator improvements. This MSDN page outlines all the tools and features contained by WP SDK.
Microsoft released this week a new version of the Advertising SDK for Windows Phone, a tool providing Silverlight and XNA ad controls that are delivered via Microsoft Advertising Exchange for Mobile, and helping developers to monetize their WP7 applications.
An App Hub account has a $99/year membership fee and it is required if one wants to submit an application to the Windows Phone Marketplace. To ensure minimum quality, before being published, applications go through a certification process verifying if applications are reliable, if they use phone’s resources efficiently, if they do not interfere with phone’s functionality, and if they have no malicious software.