Alots getting said right now about what Win 7 mobile is and isn’t.. what it can and can’t or will or won’t be. Enough that I’ll just let everyone read it themselves and make their own opinions on the subject. Announcements that came out at Mix 2010 on the dev side of the things for Win 7 are to me a whole lot more interesting.
Most are going to just gloss over a small tid-bit that’s well worth looking into because of all the things in the new Win 7 swirling controversy of Zunes and HD video and support for existing devices and what devices can and can’t work with this… is a small package called the Expression Blend Developer Kit for Windows phone.
Now I’m not going to go all fanboy and squeal like a little girl about all the glories that this will unlock – but I will go so far as to say that there’s an unexpected consequence, or even reward that may come from this – which is that Microsoft’s increasing exposure to the Expression toolset and Silverlight. Expression gives those with a designer skillset that happen to bedevelopers far greater powers and control than any other Microsoft product to date, which has been sorely lacking.
Microsoft’s history of creating anything for a designer – someone with a more visual eye and interface as opposed to the back end developer has been hit or miss at best. No one argues their IDEs for Visual Studio aren’t great, but anyone who cared as much about the aesthetics and usability of the tools they developed as they did about the code was pretty much stuck in hell.
Its a long standing rule that developers are engineers – and engineers are great at a lot of things but looks, appearances and anything involving social experiences… they really tend to lag in those skill sets. Designers on the ohter hand are very people and social conscience. Unfortunately they’ll build things if you let them that have no actual purpose other than aesthetics and drive performance and business logic right into the ground. They live in two worlds and never the twain shall meet is the theory.
Expression Blend is a bridge for those two worlds which is surprisingly easy to use – and more surprisingly – allows a very high level of access to code usually reserved for more code development IDEs. And it’s in providing a Expression Blend for the Windows Mobile 7 platform tool for free that Microsoft may unwittingly be reaping an unseen benefit.
The complete Mobile dev kit includes Expression Blend, XNA (the game development platform) and Visual Studio 2010 Express with all the Windows Mobile 7 Phone add-ins. Now, far be it from me to point out that if you’re developing an app using this it can port directly over to a lot of platforms beyond the Mobile phone market. And I’m in no way hinting that a smart developer wouldn’t care about the fact that the dev kits meant for the mobile market and use it for all of their rapid prototyping and development. (Yeah, I’d never do that.)
Anyway … here’s the links … check it out…
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