Report: Windows Phone OS 7.0 Development Details Leak

From DailyTech: Windows Phone 7 Series hopes to continue Microsoft's recent success that began with Windows 7 for PCs. The new mobile OS, set to air this holiday season, scraps past efforts entirely. In its place is a colorful operating system quite unlike anything else on the market. While most phone makers aspire to adopt a look similar to the popular iPhone with chiclet icons on a grid, the Win7 phone instead features deeper nesting of information, bright flat icons, and oversized text.

One of the biggest questions surrounding the brand new OS is what kind of apps it will be able to support. Microsoft is set to officially release most of these details at the Mix 2010 developers conference (March 15-17), but they have reportedly leaked early.

According to the leaked documents obtained by WMPoweruser, the operating system (officially dubbed Windows Phone OS 7.0, or WPOS7.0 for short) will be built on a mix of Silverlight (Microsoft competitor to Adobe's Flash), XNA (the loop-based multi-platform game development tools previously used on the Xbox 360 and Zune), and the .NET Compact Framework.

Reportedly native applications are only allowed to be made by OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and mobile operators. That raises questions of whether Opera Mini and Mozilla's Fennec browsers will make it to the new OS. It also raises some serious questions for Microsoft's app developers if it decides to stick with this policy.

Native applications are applications written to run directly on the system, as opposed to running via an emulation layer. Most non-native apps are written in a language like Java.

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