Microsoft detailed on Wednesday both the planned "Mango" update to its Windows Phone smartphone platform, due this fall with nearly 1,500 new APIs, and development tool improvements to help build applications for the platform.
With Mango, Microsoft is building up its phone platform in such areas as list scrolling, memory usage, and data access. "Mango now includes a local SQL database that allows you to save and query data within your apps," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .Net developer platform, at the Mix11 conference in Las Vegas. APIs, meanwhile, expose capabilities like the Silverlight 4 rich Internet plug in feature set.
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Data loads faster in Mango. While Windows Phone 7 freezes when it gets new data, Mango is "immediately responsive even if the data hasn't come in," Guthrie said. A generational garbage collector allows for garbage collection of memory without pausing the application. "This enables much faster application startup and much smoother interaction, especially with games."
Mango will support the newly released Internet Explorer 9 browser, including the core browsing engine for high performance, said Joe Belfiore, Microsoft corporate vice president of Windows Phone program management. The smartphone OS upgrade also will support an 16 additional languages, including Asian languages, and search capabilities are improved as well. Mango also boasts HTML5 capabilities, such as background audio playing from the browser, and native application improvements in areas like data integration.
"There's a lot of things we're doing in this release to enable you to better integrate your application, the data, and the services and the sensors on the phone," Belfiore said. Also, multitasking enables faster application switching. Background code execution is conducted to improve battery life, and a jump list capabilities helps uers get right to applications.
Windows Phone Developer Tools for building Mango applications will be available for free next month, featuring improved emulator capabilities, including location simulation. Profiling support in the tools allows developers to identify hot spots in an application and pinpoint problems. "It'll actually walk you through the code that you need to fix in order to address them," Guthrie said. Also, a memory allocation capability tracks objects based on how much memory is being allocated.
