Introducing Windows Phone 8 Development

Editor's Notes

1. In Windows Phone 8, the .NET Compact Framework has been replaced by CoreCLR, which is the same .NET engine used on Windows 8. This delivers stability and high performance to your apps, so they can take advantage of multicore processing and improve battery life.
2. Managed Apps are NGEN’d for you (compiled to native) in the Windows Phone Store in Windows Phone 8, so typically start and run faster When you build your app in Visual Studio, the code is not compiled into a native image, but into a machine-independent Common Intermediate Language (CIL) binary file (formerly known as Microsoft Intermediate Language, or MSIL)When you submit your app to the Windows Phone Store, you submit the CIL fileOn submission, CIL file is converted to optimized Machine Dependent Intermediate Language, or MDILWhen a user downloads your app to a device, it is pre-jitted to a native image
3. ManagedManaged apps use XAML to define the user interface and Visual Basic or C# as the coding language. Existing Windows Phone apps that were written using these techniques are fully compatible with Windows Phone 8. XAML-based apps have gained new features such as new controls and auto-scaling to high resolution. New managed APIs coming to Windows Phone 8 include a new map control powered by Nokia maps and a wallet API for storing payment methods and enabling NFC-based payments.
4. NativeWindows Phone 8 SDK supports native development, including significant subset of the Windows 8 SDK, enabling developers to share a significant amount of code between Windows 8 and the phone, particularly for native apps. With the addition of native development support, Windows Phone 8 reduces the need to port and maintain components such as compute engines, graphic libraries, and API sets.In addition to native development, Direct3D is being added to the family of Windows Phone technologies. This means that for the first time, a Direct3D-based PC game can share much of its code base with a phone version, and developers can use state-of-the-art middleware tools and engines that power the industry’s biggest game titles to develop games for Windows Phone.Direct3D app refers to apps that are written entirely in native code, and which use only Direct3D for their UI. This type of app uses a completely different app model than managed apps, and can’t use many of the features of managed apps, such as live Tiles and push notifications.. However, in Windows Phone 8 Developer Preview several new features were added for Direct3D apps to provide software keyboard input support, device theme, and screen resolution detection, and a set of Launchers and Choosers for adding many common phone tasks to your Windows Phone app.Windows Phone 8 SDK supports a subset of the Direct3D library at the 9_3 feature level.
5. Direct3D and XAMLDirect3D and XAML app development is an attractive choice for developers who want the graphics capabilities of Direct3D but also want to use some of the features only available to managed apps such as Tiles and XAML controls. You can use the DrawingSurface and DrawingSurfaceBackgroundGrid controls to incorporate Direct3D graphics into managed apps to take advantage of managed code features with a very small performance loss.
6. XAML/Managed + NativeWindows Phone 8 SDK supports the development of solutions where the primary UI is written in XAML using C# or VB, but where a native project is included to perform some processing in native code. This allows the porting of existing components written in C++ for other platforms to Windows Phone and allows managed apps to use them. Developers can enjoy all the productivity and benefits of developing most of the UI of their app using XAML and managed code, but still call out to ported components that have previously been developed in C++ for other platforms.These could be components such as compute engines, graphic libraries, and API sets.
7. HTMLHTML-based phone apps are not a supported app model in Windows Phone 8 SDK. However, a developer can create an app that uses an embedded browser control to display local HTML content. Also, in Windows Phone 8 SDK, the phone’s browser has been upgraded to Internet Explorer Mobile 10, with a host of new features such as a robust HTML5/CSS3 implementation, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), ES5, IndexedDB, gesture events, and the addition of the high-performance scripting engine, creating new, interesting possibilities for Windows Phone 8 SDK HTML developers.
8. HTML5 App Project TemplateA developer can create a managed app with a XAML front end that uses an embedded browser control to display local HTML content, and it’s possible to access phone APIs by using the InvokeScript method and ScriptNotify events.
9. There are several things you can do with Tiles: Support multiple sizes, customizable by your customer.Choose from one of three visual templates to help your app stand out.Offer a variety of secondary Tiles.Control which page your customers land on when clicking on your secondary Tiles.The Tile API wraps the OS Tile experience so 3rd party app developers have access to exactly the same tile functionality as the built-in apps.
10. You can use Launchers in your Windows Phone 8 Developer Preview app to help a user perform common tasks. The following Launchers are new in Windows Phone 8 Developer Preview.SaveAppointmentTaskMapDownloaderTaskMapUpdaterTaskMapsTaskMapsDirectionsTaskShareMediaTaskThrough the ShareMediaTask class, your app can directly access the share picker, so users can share photos like they do using the built-in photo viewer.
11. SpeechIn Windows Phone 8 SDK, users can interact with your app using their voice.
12. Windows Phone 8 SDK introduces the Wallet, which app users can use to do the following:Collect coupons, credit cards, memberships, loyalty cards, and more in one place.Manage the payment instruments that they use in the app and music store.Link items in the Wallet to apps on their phone.Make contactless transactions, using Near-Field Communication (NFC), in some markets.The Wallet gives app developers the ability to provide users with a richer experience by integrating with their Wallet items. Using the functionality provided through the Wallet namespace, you can create, read, write, and delete Wallet items from your app. The Wallet integration is additional functionality that allows you to better reach customers by being able to engage with them on an additional new surface area. In addition, Wallet items enable users to deep link in to your app so that you can provide a more meaningful in-app experience.
13. LongListSelectorThe LongListSelector the Swiss Army Knife of selection. Think of it as ListBox++--, it has everything you expect from ListBox plus a bunch of advanced capabilities and great on-device performance minus the levels of abstraction and generality that tend to slow ListBox down. LongListSelectorsupports flat lists, grouped lists (with headers!), and also implements the "jump list" header navigation UI that makes the "People" app so efficient!  
14. With Windows Phone 8 SDK, you can create Voice over IP (VoIP) apps that allow users to make audio and video calls over their data connection. VoIP apps are integrated into the built-in phone experience so that, for example, incoming calls are displayed using the same phone UI as regular cellular calls.
15. On two devices that each have a Near-Field Communication (NFC) chip, app users can perform these scenarios simply by tapping their phones, or phone and tablet together
16. Windows.Net.NetworkingThe Windows Runtime API, Windows.Networking.Sockets, has been adopted for Windows Phone 8. It has been implemented as a Windows Phone Runtime API, making it easy to use in whatever supported programming language you choose. Although we've enhanced the .NET API, System.Net.Sockets, to support more features such as IPv6 and listener sockets, you should consider using the new API for sockets programming because it is more portable than the .NET API. Windows.Networking.Sockets has been built from the ground up to be clean, secure, and easy-to-use APIs that enforce best practices. Incoming socketsWindows Phone 8 Developer Preview introduces the enhancements to incoming sockets. System.Net.Sockets and Windows.Networking.Sockets both support incoming sockets, which means your app can listen for an incoming network connection, and then bind to that connection.Support for IPv6Support for the 128-bit addressing system for devices on a network has been added to System.Net.Sockets, and also is supported in Windows.Networking.Sockets.Winsock native API supportWinsock native APIs are supported in Windows Phone 8 SDK. One key advantage of using Winsock APIs is that you can reuse the custom networking functionality that you’ve already implemented using Winsock, so it’s easier for you to create your app on the Windows Phone OS 8.0 platform.
17. On Windows Phone 8, you can create a custom contact store for your app. When you save contacts to this store, they will appear on the phone’s People hub, integrated with the user’s other contacts. Your contact store can use the standard set of contact properties, such as name and address, but you can also store custom properties for each contact. The contact store APIs also provides a mechanism for you to enumerate changes between your custom contact store on the phone and a contact store you maintain in a cloud service in order to synchronize the two stores.Note: The custom contact store APIs only provide access to the contacts created by your app. If your app needs read-access to the phone’s contact store or calendar, there are different APIs that you should use.
18. You can use file and protocol associations in Windows Phone 8 to automatically launch your app when another app launches a particular file type or protocol. For example, a file association allows your app to launch to handle an email attachment. You can also use the association launching API to launch another app based on a specific file type or protocol.
19. For each product that users can purchases through in-app purchasing, a developer enters a description in Windows Phone Dev Center, in addition to prices for each region where users can make the in-app purchase. Using the APIs in Windows Phone 8 Developer Preview, a developer can list, within an app, the products that are available for users to purchase in that app. Developers don’t need to write special code for handling different types of purchase instruments. All purchase methods that users can use to purchase apps and games are supported for in-app purchasing. The app or game must host and deliver any content associated with the in-app product.
20. The Windows Phone EmulatorThe emulator runs a full copy of the Windows Phone OS inside a virtual machine. You can debug your apps on the emulator pretty much the same way as when running on the real phone.The emulator contains most of the complete Windows Phone experienceIt does have the browser and will provide the phone behaviours for things like placing calls and sending SMS messagesIt also contains an emulation of the Windows Phone camera, GPS and motion sensorsYou can also use the emulator to capture screenshots of programs running on the phone   
21. In general, the Windows Phone app platform enables apps that target Windows Phone OS 7.1 to run without modification or recompilation on Windows Phone 8. However, there are occasional differences in behavior between versions of the Windows Phone Application Platform. Typically, the new behaviour includes a feature improvement or a bug fix.
22. Windows Phone 8 introduces feature improvements or behavior changes that may cause incompatibility issues for existing apps. For some features and APIs, rather than introducing a breaking change, the Windows Phone Application Platform provides a quirks mode that preserves the legacy behavior and applies it where appropriate, depending on the version of the Windows Phone the app was originally built and tested for. If the target version is Windows Phone OS 7.1, quirks mode either emulates the same behavior or uses the same code as Windows Phone OS 7.1. In other words, the app runs in Windows Phone 8 as it did when it was tested against the runtime it originally targeted. However, if the source code for an app that targets Windows Phone OS 7.1 is recompiled to target Windows Phone 8, quirks mode is no longer in effect. Because the app now targets Windows Phone 8, it executes the new code in all cases. Quirks mode is not an opt-in or configurable feature—it is applied automatically depending on an app's target platform.There are two scenarios in which a Windows Phone OS 7.1 app may behave differently when it runs on Windows Phone 8 Developer Preview. Source incompatibility and quirks are applied. With source app compatibility issues, there is a runtime quirk provided in Windows Phone 8 Developer Preview that executes the legacy Windows Phone OS 7.1 behavior regardless of the whether the phone is a Windows Phone OS 7.1 or Windows Phone 8 Developer Preview device. When the same app is recompiled for Windows Phone 8 Developer Preview the quirk is no longer applied and the app behaves differently.Binary app incompatibility: When an app that is compiled for Windows Phone OS 7.1 is run on Windows Phone 8 Developer Preview, but does not operate the same because of a difference in runtime behavior.
23. Points to reinforce:DevCamps & HackathonsFree, hands-on training from Windows 8 expertsLearn about Windows 8 features to differentiate your appLearn about Windows 8 app guidelinesHelp you meet the quality bar of Windows Store30 to Launch provides DevCamp-like training, at your own pace, for freeDaily emails with training and resourcesCulminates in an App Excellence LabApplication Excellence LabsFree, two hour opportunity to review your app with a Premier Field Engineer!Provide advice, feedback & guidance to help you meet the quality bar for the Windows StoreDevelopers whose apps are ready for the Store submission process will receive a developer account tokenOtherwise, you’ll get actionable feedback on what you can improve and the opportunity to return for another review