NEW FEATURES OF WINDOWS MOBILE PLATFORM

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1 NEW FEATURES OF WINDOWS MOBILE PLATFORM Dragos BARBIERU, Marius POSTOLACHE Advanced Distributed Learning Department, CAROL I National Defence University, Panduri no , Bucharest, Romania dragos.barbieru@adlunap.ro, marius.postolache@adlunap.ro Catalin RADU Advanced Distributed Learning Department, CAROL I National Defence University, Panduri no , Bucharest, Romania catalin.radu@adlunap.ro Abstract: This is a very good time for developers, as the Smartphone race has begun between the major players. Windows Phone 7 is a new brand mobile device that incorporates a set of features necessary to build applications that satisfy the needs of consumers, to allow developers to easily create powerful interactive application using Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft XNA development platforms. Keywords: Web Services, SOA, Mobile Devices, WCF. Mobile devices today are common in everyday life, they are used to be always online. Beyond the usual functions of a mobile phone, telephone calls, , sms, new features have appeared which completely transform the functionality of a phone, making it a micro computer. Obviously, there are limitations and they are imposed by technology. Applications that run on mobile devices, can be either standalone, or can interact with different services offered to the users. Software applications are constrained by several factors too, such as screen size, storage capacity, limited memory, processor power, battery life, size and shape of the input devices, the connection speed to various services. Windows Phone 7 is the latest operating platform from Microsoft for running mobile applications be they standalone or connected. This platform is based on Microsoft Silverlight and XNA Framework that are underneath powered by.net Compact Framework (.NETCF)..NETCF provides the managed runtime environment for both Silverlight and XNA applications targeting Windows Phone 7. Mobile smart clients built for Windows Phone can use a number of different technologies for remote communications including text messaging, -based transports, sockets, and web services. Windows Phone 7 promises to be an amazing mobile phone operating system, given its innovative user interface and functionality, as well as its great development platform upon which you can quickly and easily build games and applications. Using Silverligh has already given web programmers unprecedented power to develop sophisticated user interfaces with a mix of traditional controls, high-quality text, vector graphics, media, animation, and data binding that run on multiple platforms and browsers. Windows Phone 7 extends Silverlight to mobile devices. The applications for Windows Phone 7 are written in.net managed code and is possible to develop application in Visual Basic.NET or in C#. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone includes XNA Game Studio 4.0 and an on-screen phone emulator, and also can be integrates with Visual Studio Using Microsoft Expression Blend you can develop visuals and animations for Silverlight applications. Before you create a Visual Studio project, you must decide whether is a Silverlight program or an XNA program. Also you can use some XNA libraries in a Silverlight program and vice versa. But you can t create an application that mixes visuals elements from both platforms.

2 Criteria that you can use to determine whether you want to use Silverlight or XNA Framework for your Windows Phone application are presented in the following table lists. TABLE 1. When to Use Silverlight or XNA Framework (source: Silverlight XNA XAML support. High performance for game framework. Rapid creation of a Rich Internet Applicationstyle user interface. Rapid creation of multi-screen 2D and 3D games. Windows Phone controls Manage art assets such as models, meshes, Support for embedded video inside your sprites, textures, effects, terrains, or animations in application. the XNA Content Pipeline. HTML web browser control. From the development platform point of view, Windows Phone offers an interesting developing experience for developers. A Windows Phone is bound to have 800x480 WGA or 480x320 HVGA resolution, touch screen, GPS sensor, accelerometer, compass, light, camera, multimedia, GPU with DirectX9, and three hardware buttons. In the Silverlight for Windows Phone templates provided for application development using Silverlight platform, there are five types of project we can choose, depending on what we need: 1. Windows Phone Application, which provides an empty page with no control at all. 2. Windows Phone Databound Application, which provides an application template that uses the ListBox control and navigation features. It can be used to create a variety of applications that display data. 3. Windows Phone Panorama Application, which provides a sample usage of panorama navigation in an application. 4. Windows Phone Pivot Application, which provides a sample usage of pivot navigation in an application. 5. Windows Phone Class Library, to build components that can be reused in other projects. Windows Phone 7 supports multi-touch, and working with multi-touch is an important part of developing programs for the phone. When using the Windows Phone Emulator, mouse clicks and mouse movement on the PC can mimic touch on the emulator, but for only one finger. You can test out multi-touch for real on the phone emulator if you have a multi-touch monitor running under Windows 7. In the absence of a multi-touch monitor, you might want to explore simulating multitouch with multiple mouse devices. Windows Phone 7 devices also have a built-in accelerometer, which can be very difficult to simulate in an emulator. To start development of Windows Phone applications, we need Windows Phone Developer Tools set. It includes Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, Windows Phone Emulator, XNA Game Studio, Expression Blend for Windows Phone, samples, and documentations. If you have already installed Visual Studio Professional or later versions, an additional Add-In for Visual Studio will automatically be installed. System requirements specified by MSDN site are presented in the following table lists: TABLE 2. System requirements (source: Windows Phone Developer Tools Windows Phone Emulator Operating System: Windows 7 and Windows.xap packet no more than 400MB Vista Windows Vista (x86 and x64) ENU Service No GPU usage Pack 2 all editions other than Starter Windows 7 (x86 and x64) ENU all editions Only supports VC-1 encoding, no support for blur other than Starter and drop-shadow Hard disk with a minimum 3GB free space Data in isolated storage will be stored in emulator until activated Recommend 2 GB of memory Does not support multi touch simulation using mouse; only devices that actually have multi

3 Graphic card that supports DirectX 10 with WDDM 1.1 driver touch feature may support the simulation. Accelerometer, GPS, and camera cannot be used as in the real device. By creating a project we will have these files: File App.xaml/App.xaml.cs MainPage.xaml/MainPage.xaml.cs Background.png SplashScreenImage.jpg Properties\AppManifest.xml Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs Properties\WMAppManifest.xml Description The application initializes resources and layouts of the application. Interface of the application. A graphic file, icon in the applications list. This icon can be replaced by developer. A graphic file that is displayed when application is launched. Manifest file for application package. Assembly file that contains information regarding the name and version of metadata. Manifest file with specific metadata regarding Windows Phone application. Modern distributed systems are based on the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This type of application architecture is based on loosely coupled and interoperable services. The global acceptance of web services has changed how these application components are defined and built. They re fuelled by vendor agreements on standards and proven interoperability. This combination has helped set web services apart from other integration technologies. Service-Oriented Architecture is a mechanism that enables organizations to facilitate communication between the systems running on multiple platforms. In fact service-oriented architecture is collection of many services in the network. These services communicate with each other and the communications involves data exchange and even service coordination. The Web Services architecture has been based on a number of open and freely available internet standards such as XML, SOAP and WSDL. Its main purpose is to provide a basic architecture for interoperability between applications. The Web Services architecture consists of several components. One of them is an interface description language that defines the methods and bindings of the Web Service, which constitute the API of the Web Service. An XML-based interface description language, called the Web Service Description Language (WSDL), is used for this purpose. To invoke a Web Service, the request and response are sent using the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft s unified framework for building reliable, secure, transacted, and interoperable distributed applications. WCF represents a new step in distributed programming for developers using the.net Framework. WCF is a layered architecture that supports a lot of the distributed application development styles. The layered architecture of Windows Communication Foundation is presented in Figure 1.

4 Figure 1. Windows Communication Foundation architecture WCF includes the following set of features: Service Orientation; Interoperability; Multiple Message Patterns; Service Metadata; Data Contracts; Security; Multiple Transports and Encodings; Reliable and Queued Messages; Durable Messages; Transactions; AJAX and REST Support; Extensibility; The traditional component-oriented programming models offer only a single way for clients to call a method: the client makes a call, blocks while the call is in progress, and then continues executing once the method returns. Windows Communication Foundation supports this classic invocation model, but it also provides built-in support for two additional operation types: one-way calls for fire-andforget operations and duplex callbacks that let the service call back to the client. Web services consumable by Windows Phone can be in the form of SOAP, plain HTTP, or REST. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Services can be hosted with Internet Information Services (IIS) or mono server. Windows Phone 7 Features Not supported Supported Duplex communication Asynchronous communication over HTTP WCF Data Services Silverlight SDK support for WCF Custom bindings Add Service Reference support in VS2010 Sockets WS proxy cannot be generated dynamically RSS and Atom feeds

5 Model execution on a Windows Phone has a complete cycle, from when the application is launched until it is deactivated. This execution model is designed to provide a fast, responsive experience at all times. This causes the Windows Phone to only be able to run one application at a time. This is to prevent the device from being slow or unresponsive due to the existence of background applications. Several terminologies we should get familiar with in order to understand the aspects of execution model on Windows Phone application: Tombstoning - a procedure in which the operating system deactivates the application process as users exits the application. Operating system preserves any information about the application s state. When the application is re-launched, the operating system restarts the process and sends the last known state from before the application was turned off; Page State - a state regarding the application page. It includes scroll positions or text field contents. Modifications to this state is done by overriding OnNavigatedTo or OnNavigatedFrom methods; Application State - an application s condition in which there are no specific associations to any page. This condition can be modified using PhoneApplicationService class; Persistent Data - data shared by application. This data is stored and retrieved from isolated storage. Application setting is one example of persistent data; Transient State - transient data are those related to an instance of the application. Transient data is stored in state dictionary provided by PhoneApplicationService. An application in tombstoned state will return to transient condition when application is reactivated. An example of transient state is web service query. A Windows Phone 7 device is required to contain several other hardware features - sometimes called sensors - and provide some software services, perhaps through the assistance of hardware. These are the ones that affect developers the most: Wi-Fi - the phone has Wi-Fi for Internet access to complement 3G data access through the cell provider. Software on the phone includes a version of Internet Explorer; Accelerometer - an accelerometer detects acceleration, which in physics is a change in velocity. When the camera is still, the accelerometer responds to gravity. Programs can obtain a three-dimensional vector that indicates how the camera is oriented with respect to the earth. The accelerometer can also detect sharp movements of the phone; Location - the phone can use multiple strategies for determining where it is geographically located. The phone supplements a hardware GPS device with information from the Web or cell phone towers. If the phone is moving, course and speed might also be available; Vibration - the phone can be vibrated through program control; FM Radio - an FM Radio is available and accessible through program control; Push Notifications - some web services would normally require the phone to frequently poll the service to obtain updated information. This can drain battery life. To help out, a push notification service has been developed that will allow any required polling to occur outside the phone and for the phone to receive notifications only when data has been updated; Camera - the phone has at least a 5-megapixel camera with flash. Programs can invoke the camera program for their own input, or register themselves as a Photos Extra Application and appear on a menu to obtain access to photographed images, perhaps for some image processing. When you develop a Windows Phone application you distribute to Windows Phone Marketplace through the Windows Phone developer portal. Windows Phone Marketplace puts in place the rules and process to ensure that the published applications are high in quality. The following list describes the requirements for application certification: reliable; efficient use of resources; application does interfere with the phone functionality; safe.

6 Figure 2. Solar System application Microsoft Windows Phone is a great consumer phone because it has all of the features to which users have become accustomed with the Apple iphone and Android-powered smartphones, like the Motorola Droid and HTC Incredible. These features include multitouch, a beautiful user interface that implements a new modern design Microsoft has named Metro, social networking services like Facebook, and support for popular accounts such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Google, and AOL, or, if you are a corporate user, Microsoft Exchange. Uniquely, the phone ships with a version of Microsoft Office that you can use to read, edit, save, and synch any Word files, Excel spreadsheets, and other Office formats, making it a great phone for those who use Office at home or in the office. Windows Phone can also integrate with Xbox LIVE, making it a great choice for gamers. References [1] [2] Silverlight for Windows Phone learn & practice, Microsoft Innovation Center, Puja Pramudya. [3] Programming Windows Phone 7, Microsoft Press, Charles Petzold. [4] Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development, Apress, Henry Lee, Eugene Chuvyrov. [5] Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide, Microsoft Press, Dominic Betts, Federico Boerr, Scott Densmore, Jose Gallardo Salazar and Alex Homer. [6] WCF Guidance for Mobile Developers, Michele Leroux Bustamante and Nickolas Landry, May 2009.