March 15, 2010, 9:59 PM — Microsoft's MIX 10 developer event kicked off today with a keynote focusing a bit on Silverlight 4 and even more so on Windows Phone 7.
Microsoft has made the entire 2 hour keynote available online, and I'll embed it below. I suspect you'll need Silverlight installed in order to view it; you'll know you have it because it'll be auto-playing by now. Sorry about that. Anyway at 2:20 minutes you probably don't have time to watch it all, so I thought I'd compile a little list of highlights for you.
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The recording starts with a long pre-show event, the world champion yo-yo player. Seriously. So you can skip the first 25 minutes altogether. Unless you really love yo-yos.
The phone coverage starts at about the 50 minute mark with a quick overview and a look at general phone usage and a few demo apps.
Windows Phone 7 apps are going to be coded in Silverlight 4 or XNA. Since MIX 10 is a developer event, we get to see a couple of apps being developed in real time. Hit the 1:17 mark to watch a rudimentary Twitter client being built in Visual Studio, then a photo gallery app being built with Expression Blend.
Once the development stuff is done, we're back to looking at third party apps. The big reveal? Netflix. Yes, you'll be able to watch titles from your Netflix Streaming queue on your Windows Phone 7 device (they have to come up with a shorter name for these things).
At the 1:43 minute mark we see a Graphic.ly app. Graphic.ly is a social digital comic book site, and the app lets you buy, read and talk about comics on your phone. It was included in the keynote in order to show off "deep zooming."
At 1:58 we see a silly little toy called Marionette. The presenter makes an on-screen character of Steve Ballmer yelling "Phone developers, phone developers, phone developers." It's good for a chuckle at least. My favorite part is when he 'accidentally' puts Ballmer in a black turtleneck for a second.
At the 2 hour mark Seesmic's Loic Le Meur comes onstage to talk about a version of Seesmic Desktop built on Silverlight and using an open plug-in structure. He shows this running on both Windows and OS X; it wasn't clear if this means Seesmic is discontinuing the Adobe Air version of Seesmic Desktop or not.
Finally at the 2:12 mark, Xbox Live's Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb comes on stage to talk about games built with Microsoft's XNA framework. He shows off a port of a Xune game, a port of a Facebook game, and finally a title running on the Windows Phone 7 phone, the PC and the Xbox. Three platforms and apparently the same code-base.
Those were the highlights I picked up on but of course there was plenty more if you do have two hours to spend.
The best news for potential Windows Phone 7 developers? The tools are all free and available now at http://developer.windowsphone.com (which is a bit swamped at the moment). If you want to get right at the tools, you can find them here.
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