More Windows Phone 7 titbits

WMExperts have collected a few more Windows Phone 7 facts from an hour-long video interview of Brandon Watson, Microsoft’s Director of Developer Experience at their backstage event.

They note:

• Final version of developer tools will be available "months" before final release of hardware.
• New builds of WP7 developer tools every month or two
• Developers: Do expect access to WP7 phones! More info coming soon…
• Hundreds of thousands of downloads of WP7 dev tools already
• 2 million C# developers in the US  –> all potential WP7 developers
• If you’re a competent Silverlight developer, you should be able to build WP7 apps in just a few hours.
• 3rd party apps won’t be able to use email attachments
• No support for in-browser Silverlight at this time, didn’t make the cut
• Business experience was not "main concern" with this initial release; consumer UX was.
• Rejection of apps will feature a bullet list of things to fix to get it in, no vagaries
• OEM applications can’t multitask either
• No restriction on programming tools as long it compiles down to their common language runtime (C# only, more languages later)
• Socket support for WP7 will come later but is not in initial release.
• Markets of availability have not yet been announced (i.e. U.S. release vs. Europe)

Much of it is confirmation from what we know before, but of note is that developer phones are coming (hopefully soon), 3rd party apps will not be able to open e-mail attachments (a major minus for an OS that does not have a file system), phones may not come to Europe at the same time as US (!) and that socket support for apps is planned eventually.

See the full interview here.

Via MSMobiles.com