The Midweek Download: Sept. 21st Edition–A Look Back at BUILD, How to Submit Windows Phone Apps and “Metro” Style in Internet Explorer 10

In this edition of The Midweek Download, we’ve got a look back at last week’s BUILD conference as well as stories about Windows Phone and Internet Explorer. Check ‘em out.

Looking back at BUILD. If you’re a developer, you’ve probably heard about this little conference we had last week in Anaheim, Calif. called BUILD. It was a pretty big deal. We unveiled developer previews of Windows 8, Windows Server 8 and Visual Studio 2011 and gave away prototype Samsung PCs featuring the developer preview version of Windows 8, among other things. However, just in case you missed any of the news that came out of BUILD, check out this Tuesday post on the Next at Microsoft Blog, which features a five and a half minute video montage of the keynote highlights from the conference. If that isn’t enough for you, read this Sept. 13th post on Blogging Windows, which also has a three and a half minute video featuring interviews with engineers from the Windows team. Finally, don’t forget to vote in this Official Microsoft Blog poll asking what excited you most about BUILD.

Developers: Submit your Windows Phone 7.5 apps now, update WP7 apps in October. Last month, the Windows Phone team noted that once you publish the 7.5 version of an application, you will no longer be able to modify the existing 7.0 version. We also acknowledged that some might find this limiting, as several of you have since confirmed. We heard you, and are happy to report that, by the end of October, we will enable functionality in App Hub that will allow you to publish updates to both the 7.0 and 7.5 versions of your apps. Knowing that, on average, people update their apps every three to four months, this October timeframe provides assurance that you can submit 7.5 apps today, and still have access to your 7.0 app well before the next update is required. For more information, read this Tuesday post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog.

Windows Phone wins another design award. Earlier this week, the 2011 International Design Excellence Awards were announced and, despite very stiff competition, Windows Phone won the People’s Choice Award. Check out this Monday post on the Next at Microsoft Blog for more detail. The IDEA Awards are given out by the Industrial Designers Society of America. Below is a screenshot of a Windows Phone sporting its unique Metro design.

Windows Phone Design Award

Speaking of Metro style… Windows 8 Metro style IE and applications bring a first-in-class touch experience to Windows and do so without sacrificing other forms of input. Developers can build sites and apps with that same touch-first experience. This starts with basic input handling. In IE10 and Metro style apps, developers can write to a more abstract form of input, called a “Pointer.” A Pointer can be any point of contact on the screen made by a mouse cursor, pen, finger or multiple fingers. This model makes it easy to write sites and apps that work well no matter what hardware the user has. Similar to our approach for hardware acceleration, the experience gets better with better hardware, yet the APIs developers write to are hardware agnostic. For the rest of this story, read this Tuesday post on the IEBlog.

Internet Explorer 10 Preview – take three. With the new IE10 engine included in the Windows Developer Preview, developers can work with more HTML5 technologies to build touch-friendly and beautiful interactive Web applications.Windows 8 includes one HTML5 browsing engine that powers two browsing experiences: the new Metro style browser and IE10 on the desktop. The common HTML5 engine provides strong support for Web standards and a consistently fast, safe and powerful Web programming model for both browser experiences as well as for Metro style applications. Read this Sept. 13th post on the IEBlog for more detail. We’ve also updated the IE Test Drive site to be touch-friendly as well, and added some fun multi-touchable demos like Particle Acceleration, Lasso Birds, and Touch Effects:

20110913-wdpttipp-image2

Microsoft and Casio sign patent agreement. Microsoft and Casio Computer Co. Ltd. have entered into a broad, multiyear patent cross-licensing agreement that, among other things, will provide Casio’s customers with patent coverage for their use of Linux in certain Casio devices. To find out more, read this Tuesday press release on the Microsoft News Center.

That’s it for this edition of The Midweek Download. Thanks for reading!

Posted by Jeff Meisner
Editor, The Official Microsoft Blog

Tags: , , , , , ,