News · 6 Jun 2011 · MTW Editorial Team
Microsoft has clarified the situation around the “early Mango access for developers” thing that Joe Belfiore announced on Twitter a few days ago. Un-surprisingly the company isn’t going to push out Mango early to registered developers but will instead hand out development devices with Mango pre-installed to a select number of developers similar to what the company did last year prior to the launch of Windows Phone 7. This may be disappointing to some but it’s clearly the way to go to prevent people from registering to the dev program in masses just to get early access to the update (tech support would have been a mess too).
To update Joe’s tweet: We’re working on a plan. Just like last year, when we made developer phones available with the Windows Phone 7 OS, we plan to have developer phones this summer supporting new Mango features like the gyroscope. We don’t have any dates to share just yet, so stay tuned.
The developer handset will most probably be the HTC Mazaa that has been used in all Windows Phone 7 Mango demos so far.
UPDATE: Scratch all that. Apparently Microsoft’s Cliff Simpkins confirmed that registered developers will get access to Mango via an update if things go as planned:
– the team is actively working to provide a way to restore the phone back to a baseline, but if a crash happens in mid-flash (while the device is being repartitioned and ROM is being updated), the device would likely require outside assistance. Hopefully, we’ll have more information on this in the near future.
[…]
Thanks folks, as I believe it’s been mentioned elsewhere, we are looking into this. The team fully realizes that there is no substitute for testing on real hardware, whether it’s to get a feel for how the app really performs, or if your using sensors (e.g., camera, Motion Sensor, etc.), or developing a game that may have issues in the emulator.
Challenges here include creating the tool that would allow for the updates as well as do the backup/restore to allow you to get back into a base state where your MO can support you again (either if you want to return to WP OS 7.0 or you want to upgrade to the official WP OS 7.1).One of the chief issues is that the update brings your entire device up to a pre-release state; doing a hard reset brings the device back to a ‘clean’ state, but that ‘clean’ is a ‘clean’ pre-release; and if the update fails while the device is in mid-update, you don’t have a ‘clean’ state to return to, which would then need involvement from a human being, some tools, and an image file.
Also – as Derek mentioned, we will be working to make sure that developer evangelists have ‘Mango’ devices to allow you to get a feel for how your apps work on different ‘Mango’ devices.
We are getting mixed messages here but Microsoft will hopefully clarify the whole situation soon enough.
source: Microsoft via wpcentral and Cliff Simpkins thanks for the heads up Marc and MickNDev
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