Nokia and Microsoft partnership: what’s in it for developers?

Nokia and Microsoft today announced some very interesting news: Nokia's next smart phone operating system will be Windows Phone 7. Yes, you read it right: Visual Studio, .NET, Silverlight, XNA and so forth get to replace Symbian as the main platform for those phones. And just yesterday, Windows Phone 7 looked like a small player in the market saturated already by Android, iOS and Symbian.

I've been lately doing much work with the Windows Phone 7 platform, and must say I'm impressed by the tooling. Compared to Symbian or Android, the experience is much smoother. No manually editing config files with Emacs, tyring to solve low-level linefeed/carriage return issues (especially on the Windows platform), or trying to figure out the correct simulator version for your application.

Shortly put, it's a great announcement for today. For details, read the Nokia side and the Microsoft side of the announcement.