Detect CPU architecture at runtime for Windows 8 Store Apps

  If you are developing an application for the Windows 8 Store it is very important that you test it on an ARM device (Surface RT, Asus VivoTab RT, Dell XPS 10,etc.) before sending it into certification. You will probably have some bad surprises and not everything that was fast&fluid on your development machine will continue to be so on an ARM device (the list scroll performance reminds me of the first version of Windows Phone). So you will have to simplify the layouts, animations and in some cases even rewrite part of your code. Parallel Programming is your friend if you can use it (for Kids' Orchestra I had the big problem that generating 100ms of sound output took more then 100ms so after 2 days of trying to optimize the C# source code I realized that I only had to use the Parallel.For and everything started working). 

   Due to performance differences you might need to split the user experience/code on different architectures (like disabling some animations on ARM). If this is the case it becomes very important to know the processor architecture on which your application runs. One solution would be to create 3 different packages of your applications and use the conditional compilation to differentiate between what happens on each architecture. If you still want to use only one package (Any CPU) it is enough to have a method that returns the processor architecture.
    The bad news is that WinRT framework doesn't have any method/property that returns the processor architecture  (at least I don't know it). The good news is that you can still use GetNativeSystemInfo as it is an api supported for Windows Store apps (it is even supported for Windows Phone 8 apps):

  For Windows Store apps you can use two approaches to call this api:

1. Use P/Invoke -this is the one I opted for;

2. Create a Windows Runtime Component in C++ that you can then call from managed code - this is the approach you will have to use if you need to call this function on Windows Phone 8.

   What I did is to create a public class, which I called CPU, and has one public static property NativeInfo that returns an SystemInfo object:

 public class SystemInfo  
   {  
     public ProcessorArchitecture ProcessorArchitecture;  
     public ushort ProcessorArchitectureId;  
     public ProcessorType ProcessorType;  
     public uint ProcessorTypeId;  
     public uint NumberOfProcessors;  
     public ushort ProcessorLevel;  
     public ushort ProcessorRevision;  
     public uint AllocationGranularity;  
   };  

and a public method IsProcessorFeaturePresent (invoking also a supported Api for Windows Store applications) which returns if a certain ProcessorFeature feature is supported or not.

I have also created a small sample that will give you a list with your processor details. Here is the result I got on  my Surface:

Hope you will find the class useful. Don't hesitate to contact me if you need further details.

SOURCE CODE:

CPU.cs  and Sample Project

NAMASTE!

C# XAudio2 Sound Playback for Windows Phone

     Let's begin with a small introduction to XAudio2:
     XAudio2 is a low-level audio API. It provides a signal processing and mixing foundation for games that is similar to its predecessors, DirectSound and XAudio. XAudio2 is the replacement for both DirectSound and XAudio.
     XAudio2 abstracts audio generation by separating sound data from "voice", allowing each voice to be filtered by programmable digital signal processing and effects processing functions. Voices can be "submixed" together into a single stream. There is always only one Mastering Voice that outputs the result using WASAPI.

     XAudio2 is primarily intended for developing high performance audio engines for games. For game developers who want to add sound effects and background music to their modern games, XAudio2 offers an audio graph and mixing engine with low-latency and support for dynamic buffers, synchronous sample-accurate playback, and implicit source rate conversion. Compared to WASAPI, XAudio2 requires only a minimum amount of code even for complex audio solutions. Compared to the Media Foundation engine, XAudio2 is a low-level, low-latency C++ API that is designed for use in games.

     XAudio2 cannot be used for background music - for this task you will have to use the IMFMediaEngine. XAudio2 cannot be used for capturing audio - for this task you will have to use WASAPI. Do not use XAudio2 for media playback. For that task you can use MediaElement

    XAudio2 is part of the DirectX api that is included in the new Windows Phone 8 SDK. The Api is shared between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 which means that you will be able to fully reuse your source code on both platforms. 

If you want to use XAudio2 for your C#/VB/HTML code you have two options:

1. Use SharpDX . SharpDX is a wrapper of the DirectX Api under .Net platform. Theoretically you can use it to call XAudio2 api directly from your managed code. Practically what happens is that the .Net CLR/GC on ARM seem to block native threads so your audio will shutter/glitch in certain conditions. I had the same problem when I was developing our Windows 8 game Kids' Orchestra and the audio had glitches even on a core i7 processor.

2. The other option, which from my experience works better, is to develop an Windows Phone Runtime Component that will manage the XAudio2 part and expose the needed methods/events to the managed code.

      To better understand how it is done I took the Windows 8 sample XAudio2 audio file playback sample C++ from MSDN and ported to Windows Phone 8 by splitting it in two projects: The C#/Xaml part for the UI and the "audio" project which is a Windows Phone Runtime component developed in C++.

     The porting was pretty easy. I only had to re-code the player class to make it "visible" to the managed code project and added an event that will tell you when a certain Source Voice has finished playing its buffer/sound (we have 7 sounds and each sound has a Source Voice associated to it). If you need further details on how to write a Windows Phone Runtime component in C++ have a look at this  MSDN Post

    This sample only plays Wav files that are resources in the C++ project. You could also dynamically generate sounds in managed code and pass the Wave/buffer data as a byte[] to the runtime component. Inside the native code you will then generate an XAUDIO2_BUFFER and submit it to a Source Voice for playing.

     I have attached the SOURCE CODE for the Windows Phone project. If you have problems with it don't hesitate to contact me.

NAMASTE!

Bluetooth Service's UUIDs

If you are developing on Windows Phone 8 and trying to communicate with a Bluetooth device using a StreamSocket these UUID's might come in handy:


ServiceDiscoveryServerServiceClassID= '{00001000-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
BrowseGroupDescriptorServiceClassID = '{00001001-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
PublicBrowseGroupServiceClass = '{00001002-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
SerialPortServiceClass = '{00001101-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
LANAccessUsingPPPServiceClass = '{00001102-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
DialupNetworkingServiceClas = '{00001103-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
IrMCSyncServiceClass = '{00001104-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
OBEXObjectPushServiceClass= '{00001105-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
OBEXFileTransferServiceClass = '{00001106-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
IrMCSyncCommandServiceClass= '{00001107-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
HeadsetServiceClass = '{00001108-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
CordlessTelephonyServiceClass = '{00001109-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
AudioSourceServiceClass = '{0000110A-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
AudioSinkServiceClass= '{0000110B-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
AVRemoteControlTargetServiceClass = '{0000110C-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
AdvancedAudioDistributionServiceClass = '{0000110D-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
AVRemoteControlServiceClass= '{0000110E-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
VideoConferencingServiceClass = '{0000110F-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
IntercomServiceClass = '{00001110-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
FaxServiceClass = '{00001111-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
HeadsetAudioGatewayServiceClass= '{00001112-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';  
WAPServiceClass = '{00001113-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
WAPClientServiceClass = '{00001114-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
PANUServiceClass = '{00001115-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
NAPServiceClass = '{00001116-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
GNServiceClass = '{00001117-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
DirectPrintingServiceClass = '{00001118-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
ReferencePrintingServiceClass = '{00001119-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
ImagingServiceClass= '{0000111A-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
ImagingResponderServiceClass = '{0000111B-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
ImagingAutomaticArchiveServiceClass = '{0000111C-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
ImagingReferenceObjectsServiceClass = '{0000111D-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
HandsfreeServiceClass = '{0000111E-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
HandsfreeAudioGatewayServiceClass = '{0000111F-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
DirectPrintingReferenceObjectsServiceClass = '{00001120-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
ReflectedUIServiceClass = '{00001121-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
BasicPringingServiceClass = '{00001122-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
PrintingStatusServiceClass= '{00001123-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
HumanInterfaceDeviceServiceClass = '{00001124-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
HardcopyCableReplacementServiceClass = '{00001125-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
HCRPrintServiceClas = '{00001126-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
HCRScanServiceClass= '{00001127-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
CommonISDNAccessServiceClass = '{00001128-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
VideoConferencingGWServiceClass = '{00001129-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
UDIMTServiceClass = '{0000112A-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
UDITAServiceClass = '{0000112B-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
AudioVideoServiceClass = '{0000112C-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
SIMAccessServiceClass = '{0000112D-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
PnPInformationServiceClass= '{00001200-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
GenericNetworkingServiceClass = '{00001201-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
GenericFileTransferServiceClass = '{00001202-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
GenericAudioServiceClass= '{00001203-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';
GenericTelephonyServiceClass = '{00001204-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB}';

Farseer Physics for Windows Store Apps using Monogame

  Last week I did a session on porting XNA Windows Phone 7.x games to Windows Store apps using MonoGame. I have to thank Dean Ellis from the MonoGame project team for all the help. 

 While XNA is not a framework directly supported by Microsoft for Windows Store apps the current version of MonoGame is compatible with Windows 8 and, the most important thing, the applications pass the WACK. There are already several games available in the Windows Store developed using MonoGame (Armed, Skiddy, Rune Legend and I guess there are more). 

   For the session I ended up using the Simple Animation sample but seeing how easy is to share the code between the platforms (Windows, Windows Phone,PC, MAC, iOS, Android, Playstation, Linux) I started looking for a physics engine. The most used Open Source physics engine seems to be Farseer Physics but it was too late to do the porting for my session. On Sunday I tried the porting and everything went pretty smooth. The only thing I've changed was the serialization/de-serialization of the "World" state. I compiled the engine and also the sample. For the Sample project the Content Project was compiled using Visual Studio 2010 (for the moment Visual Studio 2012 doesn't recognize this type of project) and added the xnb's to a Content folder inside the Visual Studio 2012 solution. 

 You can see the result in this YouTube video:

I've used SnagIt to capture the movie and it influenced the frame rate (when running without capturing the framerate is always at 60 fps). The test device was the Samsung Slate which has a powerful cpu. I would love to know if a WinRT device will be able to run at the . If any of my readers has access to a WinRT device please deploy the sample to the device and let me know if the framerate is as expected. For the sample you will have to use an external keyboard and mouse as the touch screen is not working in this version. I will try to fix it for the next release (the problem seems to be inside the MonoGame framework as I only receive the move event and not the pressed and released from the touch screen).

   

Use this link to download the full project (engine and sample): 

SOURCE CODE

NAMASTE

Phone Call screen in Windows Phone

   I've wanted to write this post for quite a while but I've always postponed it as it is a very subjective matter. In the end I decided to write my opinion. Windows Phone is really great but there are some aspects that could be improved and seem that have been designed in a hurry and never finished. One of this aspects, and it is not what this post is about, is the Application List. It is ugly and not very usable. How is it possible that Windows Mobile had before anyone else folders/groups but they are still missing in Windows Phone after more than 2 years? The application list really needs improvements/redesign.

    This post instead is about the Phone call screen. I've have always had problems with my windows phone devices starting with the Omnia 7 and ending with my Lumia 800 (I've actually tried 3 different Lumia 800 all of them gave me the same problem). The short story is that I am able to drop the call with my face by pressing the Endcall button, put the call on speaker, put it on mute or hold. I am not the only person that has these problems: my wife has the same problem with her new Lumia 710 and also heard from other people. It is a combination between the proximity sensor that activates the screen and the way I am holding the phone. So I've wondered if maybe there is a better location for the Endcall button.

    Lets start with a photo I've found on the web  (have no idea who she is) :

 

If you look at the way she is holding her phone (which I think is 90% of the cases) the upper part of the screen is in contact with the face. Let's presume that by a faulty behavior (bad driver, hardware fault, OS fault or the fact that the hardware and the software are not designed by the same company) the screen turns on while you talk. The highest probability to touch the screen with the face is in the upper half of the screen. Let's see what it means in Windows Phone:

So it is Endcall, Speaker, Hold, and Mute (exactly my case).

If you look again at the picture you can see that the less exposed part of the touchscreen(so the better choice for the buttons location)  is the lower part of the screen. The lower you go the smaller the probability is, so the best choice for the End call button is the lower part of the screen (this way you minimize the probability to press the button on faulty behavior). This is exactly (I don't know if this is the reason) what iPhone and Android did:

Both of them have chosen to put the End call button near the lower part of the touch screen. For Android (which also depends on the hardware implementation) Google concentrated all the buttons at the lower part of the screen. On the iPhone they kept the other buttons in the center region but they do have really good control over the hardware and putting a call on hold or mute is not as bad as dropping the call.

So it would be better to move the buttons in the lower part of the screen. The blank space could be filled with social information, last call, email, sms. 

Hope we will see some improvements in Phone Call screen in Windows Phone 8

NAMASTE

What MediaLibrary needs/is missing (Windows Phone)

      As we (average developers :) ) still don’t have access to the Windows Phone 8 SDK I decided to write a post on the current MediaLibrary limitations for Windows Phone. I only hope that someone from the team will read this post and maybe there is still time to improve some aspects in the new version. Everything here is my personal  opinion.

So what is missing from the MediaLibrary?

1.     The Token property exposed on the Picture object

The most important for me. Why? Let’s open Internet Explorer on the emulator and go on a webpage that has a picture in it, tap-n-hold and save it twice. If we use Windows Phone commands to launch the Pictures hub in the emulator and go to the Saved pictures album we will see both pictures (same picture but different items). Now let’s create a new project and see what we can get using the MediaLibrary class. I will use this simple code to debug and stop on the pictures to watch its properties:

MediaLibrary ml = new MediaLibrary();

//MediaPlayer.Queue.ToString(); ;

var albums = ml.RootPictureAlbum.Albums;

foreach (var album in albums)

if (album.Pictures.Count>0)

foreach(Picture pct in album.Pictures)

{

bool stophere = true;

}

  

We can see both pictures but the BIG problem is that the only way to differentiate between the two of them is the Date property (not very elegant, Handle is not public property). The Token property  makes a lot of sense to tell which picture is which (maybe also a Path member could be added but Token is way better as we already have the method to open a picture from its Token and you won't have to iterate all the MediaLibrary just to get the picture we want).

This property should be fairly easy to add as it already exists internally (when we use the PhotoChooser we will get the token associated with the selected picture and we will be able to open the picture) . 

The token could be extended also to the PictureAlbum class. It doesn’t make much sense to iterate the MediaLibrary to find a specific album if I already know what PictureAlbum I want.

2.     The possibility to create new picture albums

In this moment the Pictures Hub already has built-in albums but it is not possible to create new albums directly from the phone. It is possible to do it from Zune (which will not be used anymore) but it is not a trivial task (at least till you understand how it works). So we are mainly stuck with two “containers”: Camera Roll and Saved Pictures which is not enough for a device that theoretically could hold up more than 1GB of photos. From here the need to have tools to organize your photos better by creating new albums and copying/moving photos between albums. Maybe it is a little late to implement it in the "standard" WP8 UI as we are two months away from the official launch of the first phones on the market but maybe not too late to add the functionality in the development tools so the developers can implement it in their apps. This way a photo app could create its album and then the users will know in which album to look when they want to find pictures modified/created by a certain app.

3.     Access to the videos on the device

Needed since the first version of windows phone but still no sign of it. Videos are an important part of the device media and developers need access to this part of the MediaLibrary to enable applications like video processing, video backup, video creation and more.

4.     Make the Favorites Pictures album work

This functionality already exists in the Windows Phone Mango/Tango but it doesn’t work in the current version of the SDK. I’ve already posted a question on the forum with no answer till now. The count of the Favorites album is always 0.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpdevelop/thread/b57da1aa-cbe6-471b-be4c-6fe96a99c353

5.     Enable MediaLibrary access in the background task

Useful for applications that want to backup the pictures from the device automatically. If it’s a problem of security see 6 but if the user already agreed at some point (capabilities, ask permission) it doesn’t make sense to lock the access to the medialibrary from the background tasks.

6.    Security/capabilities

I think the current ID_CAP_MEDIALIB  is too generic. It would be better to have specific CAP for pictures, videos and songs. They are pretty distinctive and a photo editor wouldn't need access to the songs on the device? Also the user should be warned that his photos might contain GPS data in the EXIF header and he should agree to let the application access those informations.

P.S. Almost all of the features requested are already implemented in the iOS development tools.

NAMASTE

Windows Phone 8 inside VMWare

    More than a month ago some Microsoft guy in Asia made a terrible mistake and the LKG25 of Windows Phone 8 SDK leaked to the web. As I am not one of the lucky people that are the development program (as Mary Jo Foley suspected in a tweet and I believe it is true) I was more than happy when I got my hands onto the leaked version. At start I wanted to start blogging about the news that Windows Phone 8 will bring, but then I decided that it wouldn't be fair so I will wait until the official SDK. This post is not intended as a spoiler of any feature from WP8, but more like a proof of concept.
    I am sure many of you read on twitter that the new emulator is a virtual x86 machine and it comes with the virtual hard drive (.vhd file) divided on the screen resolutions.
    The idea came to me today while I was installing a clean virtual machine for development. Till now developing in a virtual machine for Windows Phone and debugging on the emulator with a decent speed/quality was impossible as you would have a virtual machines inside a virtual machine that degrades the performance exponentially. So what if you could have the development environment inside a virtual machine and then the emulator on another virtual machine that runs side by side and communicate on TCP/IP. In this case the performance of the emulator would be good (as it is not a vm inside a vm) and also the speed of the development environment would be acceptable. The virtual machine for the emulator would need 512MB or a maximum of 1GB.
     So the first thing I did is to install a trial version of VMWare Workstation 9 (should work with VMWare Fusion and also Parallels/VirtualBox). Then I have used WinIMAGE to convert the Flash.vhd file to Flash.vmdk which is the format that VMWare uses and created a virtual machine where I've attached the newly created vmdk.

     The good news is that the virtual machine works in VMWare right from the start. Not everything works (more decent is to say that some things work :) ) but hey it runs and I did nothing. The networking is not working but the most annoying part is the mouse pointer which is invisible in the virtual machine so I am blind pressing the mouse and at some point I am able to hit some buttons as you can see in the video :

More important than what this video shows (which is almost nothing) is what it could mean (even if I doubt we will see any of these in the near feature)

• Theoretically developing for Windows Phone 8 on Windows 7 should be possible and not so hard to achieve (the partition where I installed Vmware Workstation runs Windows 7)

• With some collaboration between Microsoft and VMWare/Parallels it would be possible to develop on a virtual machine and debug/deploy on the emulator which is another virtual machine. This would be great for Mac users but also for everyone (I might say like me) that likes to keep his development environments clean and separated from each other (I have a VM with VS2008 and Compact Framework, soon VS2010 will pass in a virtual machine too, I don't want to install VS2010 on my Windows 8 partition etc.)

• The emulator is an x86 virtual machine so it shouldn't be so hard to achieve plug-gable hardware into the emulator (like connect the webcam to the emulator camera, storage card to an USB key or shared folder, NFC hardware - here I might be mistaking but should be a serial connection after all). It would give us a better development environment.

P.S. Seeing that it is a virtual machine I beg the team which is in charge of the emulator to SAVE the emulator/virtual machine state between resets. It is really annoying to always start from 0 and none of the other major mobile platforms has this limitation.

Till next time NAMASTE to you my reader.

Mission Apollo

  This post starts a new chapter of my blog: Windows Phone 8. I was waiting for some time to see what was Microsoft "cooking" in the next version of Windows Phone and last week, with the leak of an internal version of the development tools, I finally got a sneak peak into Apollo (aka Windows Phone 8). There are a lot of new topics and scenarios enabled by the Windows 8 core and I already have in mind my next posts (hopefully they will follow up shortly).  

    The two photo-montages are associations of ideas between Apollo and Windows Phone. The first one is from one of my favorites cartoons, Despicable Me. The second one is from a sketch of Georges Méliès, a great visionary, considered the second father of cinematography after the Lumière Brothers. I hope that Windows Phone will be able to catch up with iOS and Android and that the new phones will be really popular.  

 

Why now?

    After last week's announcements from Microsoft the only thing that obsesses me is Why now? While both Surface and Windows Phone 8 products look great both announcements   seemed a little bit rushed.
    Lets start with the Surface presentation. The product is UBER COOL, but there are still a lot of things that are not cleared: how much will it cost, when exactly will be available to the public. My feeling was, and I might be right, that Google will announce its own low cost tablet and, at least this time Microsoft didn't want to be the last one to announce the new tablet. If the prices for the Google tablet are really 249USD and 199USD both Microsoft and Apple will be their salea affected by the low cost tablet from Google.
     What really impressed me was the Windows Phone Summit announce of Windows Phone 8. Again Windows Phone 8 will be a really cool product but, from what was shown, it is far from rtm. What I don't understand is the strategy that Microsoft adopted? They presented a cool new product still far from the release, the developers didn't get the new SDK, they've showed only the new start screen and what the main features that the new product will have and the MOST important said that there is no upgrade path to Windows Phone 8 for any of the current devices. Without giving a new toy to developers (that is the new SDK) the announcement did a lot of damage to the actual Windows Phone platform. On short term (till Windows Phone 8 devices will be out in the wild) the sells of Windows Phone will once again slow (nobody wants an old phone), with the sells of the phone the sales in the marketplace will slow so if you are a developer this is how you will be affected.  But the really BIG DAMAGE was done to Nokia. Here are some stock exchange considerations from today :


DJ MARKET TALK: Nomura Cuts Nokia Target Price
25/06/2012 12:36 MF-DJ
1036 GMT [Dow Jones] Nomura cuts its target price for Nokia (NOK1V.MI) (NOKA.AS) (NOK1V.HE) (NOA3.FRA) to EUR2 from EUR3.20, pointing to Microsoft's (MSFT.O) (MSF.FRA) new Windows Phone 8 product, to which none of Nokia's current phones will be able to be upgraded. "Now that Microsoft has confirmed that Windows Phone 7 devices cannot be upgraded to Windows Phone 8, we expect retailers and Nokia to run down inventory levels of the current Lumia range," says Nomura. It expects this to result in a sequential decline in the sales volumes Nokia reports for 3Q. Nomura rates the stock at neutral. Shares down 7% at EUR1.80.(michele.maatouk@dowjones.com)

DJ MARKET TALK: Nokia Shrs Lower After Slew Of Bad News -SocGen
25/06/2012 15:25 MF-DJ
1325 GMT [Dow Jones] Nokia (NOK1V.MI) (NOKA.AS) (NOK1V.HE) (NOA3.FRA) stock is 7.9% lower at EUR1.78, amid the slew of bad news last week, says Societe Generale analyst Andy Perkins. The latest Microsoft (MSFT.O) (MSF.FRA) Windows smartphone operating system won't work on Nokia's current Lumia devices, he notes. "In addition, Microsoft last week unveiled its own Surface tablet device, and it also seems as if Microsoft is considering [whether] to manufacture its own smartphones," Perkins says. "If Microsoft is starting to manufacture its own hardware, it is less likely to end up buying Nokia." Perkins' recommendation on Nokia stock is sell with a EUR1.60 target. (sven.grundberg@dowjones.com)

Today Nokia's stock values is doing again -8% with a one year "performance" of -54%. Why did Microsoft sneaked peaked Windows Phone 8 now when it is far form the release? Do they want to buy Nokia so they have to get the lowest price possible? If not they just want to kill Nokia after they have invested everything in the Windows Phone platform? If Microsoft don't want to buy Nokia then why all the Windows Phone 8 devices have Nokia maps and navigation software? In this moment Microsoft can't let anyone buy Nokia as it could affect their plans for Windows Phone 8. So again WHY NOW? No SDK, no timing for the new devices, no new details for the UI enhancements. A lot of damage with no immediate benefit (developers, Nokia, Microsoft). I can only hope there is a good strategy behind this announcement that I cannot see.

It cannot be the multi-core architecture:

This is from Wikipedia under Windows CE 7: 

7.0

Released in March 2011. Multi-core CPU support (SMP) Wi-Fi Positioning System Bluetooth 3.0 + HS DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) DRM technology Media Transfer Protocol Windows Phone 7 IE with Flash 10.1 support NDIS 6.1 support UX C++ XAML API using technologies like Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight for attractive and functional user interfaces Advanced touch and gesture input Kernel support for 3 GB physical RAM and supports ARMv7 assembly[25]

It cannot be also that the Windows 8 ARM kernel is more stable as it is the first ARM Windows Kernel that Microsoft creates so it still has to show its stability. On the other hand the CE Kernel, even if it is not one of the best, is very stable. The actual windows phone device are pretty good with a lot of applications missing because of some missing features in the SDK and unimpressive market shares.

On long term Microsoft can only benefit from maintaining a single kernel but on short term: Ooooops you did it again! Not the same as the last one (6.5 to 7.x) as there will be 100,000 aps in the marketplace but still some damage is done. Why do the DAMAGE if the backup is not ready yet? They should have waited to have the SDK ready, devices almost ready to sell, the enhanced UI ready and AMAZE everyone. As a developer and geek I am super excited about the new features and cannot wait to develop for WP8. As a small company owner that is investing everything in Windows Phone I don't agree with what Microsoft did and I have more doubts than ever before that Windows Phone will do a fast come back in the smartphone market (I hope that I am wrong and that both Nokia and Microsoft have some killer features ready).

So Why didn't they wait a little bit more at least for the Windows Phone?

The need for a different Marketplace

My grandmother always said that in the first day of a new year you should do what you would like to do the rest of the year. Even if the last year I didn't had a lot of time to blog I always wanted to so here I am wanting to start the year with my blog.

So what is wrong with the current version of the Marketplace? I could say nothing really, but there is so much that could be improved/changed. I am referring here to the marketplace of all major mobile platforms: Android, iOS and Windows Phone. They are more or less the same. Right now I have experience as a developer with Windows Phone marketplace and as a customer/consumer with all three of them. The marketplace was/is one of the greatest marketing/selling instrument in the software industry. In theory it gives the opportunity to everyone to sell their ideas/software all over the world. I say in theory because it enables developers to do that, but it doesn't make it easy.

One of the biggest problems I see for the moment is the number of applications. I am looking at the Microsoft "race" to catch up with the number of applications in the marketplace. In this race the number is the priority and the quality comes second. The result of this race is that the marketplace get filled with "junk". It is the same situation on all the three platforms, but today the analysts judge the success of a platform by the number of apps in the marketplace. Let's face it there are 500.000 application in the Apple marketplace and, maybe, not even 10% are quality apps. When I say junk I say applications that don't bring any innovation, written as fast as possible and thrown into the wild just to have an application out there. From my experience (I have a small application in the marketplace) in order to have a decent application there is a lot of work to be done in developing and maintaining it. Having so many applications in the marketplace "kills" the opportunity marketplace gives you if you have a quality app because it makes it almost invisible. If today you have a quality app and you publish it will be there with (I will take the Windows Phone marketplace numbers published by http://wp7applist.com/en-US/stats/ today 01.01.2012) other 451 applications published the same day. Does you application stand any chance? Some will say yes, I would say the more apps are in the marketplace the harder will be. You can only count on the people that are trying new applications. So inevitable a quality app will go down (maybe a little bit slower ) with the others and you have to find other methods to get it "visible". Another consequence of having a lot of applications published every day without a quality check is the degrade in the service offered to developers. I remember that when I wrote this post: http://sviluppomobile.blogspot.com/2011/01/windows-phone-marketplace-more.html the quality of certification the service was great. Things changed a little in the last two months (I think they had an increase in the number of applications to certify) the certification time jumped from two days to more than a week. More frustrating is seeing applications like this one published in "bulk":

So is it worth having thousands of applications without any quality filter (just rules on how to write your app)? I would prefer a quality marketplace, but maybe having both is better. It's like when you go to the market to shop: if you want products that cost less you go in one place, if you want quality products you go to another shop, if you just need one product you go in the first shop you find. The marketplace in the marketplace could improve a little bit on the quality part. It would need quality reviewers that would select the apps for the "quality" marketplace. It is easier than to go on all review websites and look for top applications on each platform. A place in the marketplace where you go when you don't know what you really want but you would like to try some quality applications. Apple, Google and Microsoft should not be the quality reviewers but continue to do what they do and then the best reviewers/websites on each platform should intersect their chosen applications (easy to say and hard to do). It is not a bullet proof mechanism.

Other suggestion regards the reviews specifically bad reviews. In this moment if you want to make a concurrent application go down you just go and slowly start to make bad reviews in all the marketplaces. (it is a situation I am dealing with). I would suggest that, if someone makes a bad review and give one or two stars, he should be "forced" to write a reason. This should help the developers understand the problem, and, if it's not true at least ask the review to be removed. Also the reviews should be disabled when the application is hidden. For the hidden applications the reviews don't make any sense.

Being able to publish a beta version of the application in the marketplace is an awesome feature, but in this moment, for me is almost useless. You have to find your beta testers, but it is a difficult task. So there should be an "open" beta option. This way anybody that wants to test the beta and has a link to it can do it with a limit of 100 users (more or less like the hidden apps but limited to a number of users).

In my opinion 2011 was a great year for Windows Phone even if the market shares don't reflect it . The 7.5 version is a great step forward and I hope that 2012 will bring us another big step. I still think that the application list is "ugly" and not really usable, we need some way to group applications (maybe an evolution of the "folder" concept).

I really hope Microsoft will make Apollo an EVOLUTION and not a REVOLUTION.

Happy New Year to all my readers! A better year to everyone.

NAMASTE