Dragos Manolescu introduces some of the new features in Windows Phone Mango - TCP and UDP sockets, network preferences and local storage –, discussing their optimization for lower power consumption.
The DependencyProperty and DependencyObject which form the building blocks for most XAML features come with a performance cost. An MSDN article “Optimizing C# for XAML Platforms” discusses this in detail along with ways to minimize its impact.
An ongoing problem with specialized platforms is the lack of support for unit testing. Developers are forced to compromise the quality of their tests or their build process in order to get anything working. Recently MonoTouch has made progress in this area, but Windows Phone and Mono for Android still lag behind.
Leaked information suggests that Microsoft is working on unifying the Windows ecosystem, while Windows Phone 8 will be based on WinRT rather than Windows CE.
PhoneGap now supports all native functionality on Windows Phone 7 being on par with iOS and Android.
In addition to updates to the Windows Azure Toolkits for Windows Phone and iOS, Microsoft has introduced a new toolkit for Android, which can be used with applications developed with the Android SDK and Eclipse.
In what’s becoming a tradition, Microsoft has once again confused the version numbers of one of their key products. In brief what you need to target Windows Phone 7.5 is the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK and the August 2011 build of the Windows Phone Toolkit. Or you can give the PhoneGap beta a spin.
An early access program allows developers to install Mango on their devices using the just released WP SDK 7.1 Beta2.
Travis Smith presents the challenges – inconsistent feature support - and advantages – code reuse - of developing cross platform mobile applications with Mono, focusing on data access patterns.
In this presentation from Strange Loop 2010, Michael Galpin discusses developing mobile web applications, HTML 5, WebKit, ACID 3, PhoneGap and Appcelerator, Viewports, geolocation, DOM storage, Web Workers, Web Sockets and server-side data pushing, Canvas, CSS 3.0, application cache, the Device API, touch events, video/audio, meta tags, and support for each of these on assorted mobile platforms.
Mike Lee and Brian LeRoux discuss how patents affect app developers and approaches to keep away patent trolls. Also: when to choose native GUIs over web GUIs for mobile apps - and when not.
