Windows Phone Mango is ready

While most of the Europe is still on vacation (myself included), Microsoft in the U.S. has been busy with development work. One of the fruits of this work is the anticipated next version of Windows Phone, codenamed Mango. The operating system hit RTM yesterday, but currently, the development tools are not ready until around September.

Mango contains over 500 new features, and there are hundreds of web pages already describing those. However, as a developer, I thought I'd collect my own quick list of what I feel are the hottest new features. Here they are, in no special order:

- Multitasking. Especially the possibility to write background agents for audio and downloads sounds great to me.

- New sensor support, especially the compass and gyroscope (when supported by the hardware).

- Socket communications. This makes it very easy to connect to many different services (or other phones) without the need to always tunnel through HTTP.

- Local database. Probably one of the biggest enablers, even though you could have implemented a rudimentary database yourself as well with Isolated Storage. But a real SQL database with LINQ support makes things a breeze.

One interesting thing to note is that in the general media, many places seem to refer Mango as version 7.5 of the platform. Maybe this was at some point the expected version number, but technically speaking, the correct version for Mango is 7.1, not 7.5.

Also worth noting is that the official name of the developer tools has changed. Previously, they were called Windows Phone Developer Tools, but now the official name is simply Windows Phone SDK 7.1. You can notice this when you download and install the development kit, for instance.