While most of the attention this week at Microsoft's BUILD Conference in Anaheim, California has centered on Windows 8, that doesn't mean Microsoft is ignoring the imminent launch of the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system, otherwise known as the Mango update. In the latest update to the Windows Phone 7 Developers blog site, Microsoft's Matt Bencke has a message for WP7 app developers: "The time to get your Mango apps into Marketplace is now." He added, "At a minimum it’s worth updating your existing app now so that when customers experience Mango they benefit from 'fast app switching' multitasking, which requires little more than a recompile of the app. If you want to stand out from the crowd, get your apps updated to take advantage of other Mango features like Live Tiles and App Connect." Unfortunately Bencke didn't go into detail on when the Mango update will be released other than a vague and broad "this fall" time table.
Bencke also seems to confirm that easy porting of Windows Phone 7 apps to Windows 8 and vise versa is available. He states, "As the Windows Phone Runtime evolves, we plan to align the PC and Windows Phone platforms as much as possible. For example as demonstrated yesterday, developers will soon be able to easily share XAML and C# code between the PC and Windows Phone. And for developers building Windows Phone apps today, those apps will work on Mango and on the next major release of Windows Phone as well. Any app that you have built, or build today, will just work."
8 Comments - Add comment