WP7-Related Sessions at MIX'11 Revealed, Hints At What's To Come

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Today's keynote presentation was entirely unrelated to WP7 and instead focused on the web with the big headline being an Internet Explorer 10 announcement. Instead, tomorrow is the next keynote presentation where Joe Belfiore is expected to spend most of the time talking about the smartphone platform.

And now we may have a pretty good idea what he's going to talk about! Microsoft let loose details about those previously TBA'd sessions related to Windows Phone just a little early and the topics give us a bunch of hints at whats going to be discussed at tomorrow's presentation. If you aren't bothered looking through that list, here's a list of what we've spotted:

• What’s Coming Next to the Windows Phone Application Platform - Andrew Clinick - 4/13
• Going Mobile with Your Site on Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Phone 7 - Joe Marini - 4/13
• Mini-Session: Get Ready for Fast Application Switching in Windows Phone - Adina Trufinescu - 4/13
• What’s New in the Windows Phone Developer Tools? - Vibhor Agarwal - 4/13
• Windows Phone Multitasking - Darin Miller - 4/13
• Multitasking in the Next Version of Windows Phone, Part II: Using Background Agents - Peter Torr - 4/13
• Sensor Access in the Next Version of Windows Phone - Mark Paley - 4/14
• What’s New for Windows Phone Development with Silverlight? - Shawn Oster - 4/14
• What’s New for Windows Phone Development with the XNA Framework? - Brian Hudson - 4/14
• Enhanced Push Notifications & Live Tiles for Windows Phone - Thomas Fennel - 4/14
• New Data Access Features Coming to Windows Phone - Sean McKenna  - 4/14

As you can see, about six of these are happening tomorrow and the other five are on Thursday which suggests that the Windows Phone keynote will be tomorrow. Of course we can see that IE9 will be a definite topic of conversation, along with multitasking being discussed in three separate sessions which is quite a few.

However, much more notable are the other topics as a majority of them hint at new areas of access and tools for developers to tinker with. Developers have been asking Microsoft to open some much needed APIs and it seems to be doing just that with access to more sensors, new changes in Silverlight development, new changes in XNA game development, and new "data access" features (maybe NFC?).

While none of those topics are directly hinting at new features, one of them is: Enhanced Push Notifications & Live Tiles for Windows Phone. Not only does this title suggest we'll be seeing a much-needed overhaul on the developer-side of live tile implementation, we could also be seeing our first glimpse at an improved notifications system something which hasn't been rumored thus far.

Obviously we don't know specifics just yet, but you can bet we'll be hearing more about it in less than 24-hours so keep your eyes glued to WPD for the rest of this week!

Via: WMPowerUser

Source: Microsoft