I was planning on watching all of the Mix videos on Silverlight for Windows Mobile, and some other content as well, but I have not gotten around to it. I had written up the following while watching the first video and wanted to get it posted before I forgot about it.

As I "predicted", Silverlight for Windows Mobile was announced at Mix 08. In conjunction with the announcement at Mix was an announcement by Nokia to make Silverlight available on S60 for Symbian OS. A CTP version of Silverlight for Windows Mobile is due out sometime this year (Q2 2008)

Mix Sessions

T12 - Mobile Devices and Microsoft Silverlight: A Primer on the New Technology. Presented by Amit Chopra and David Kline

Silverlight for mobile will be the 1.0 version, not 2.0, running as a IE Mobile browser plug-in with java script support. Initial support is for Windows Mobile 6 standard and professional (and Nokia Symbian). There will be a device specific media stack.

The first demo showed a Silverlight application running on a HTC device, loaded from the local file system. Demo applications included a analog Clock, Donkey (remember the Bill Gates Donkey.Net?), and a media player written by channel 9 which was ported to Silverlight mobile.

Amit made a comment during the demo saying that he replaced the managed code for the channel 9 media player with a scripting equivalent because that is what they support. That will be disappointing if the compact framework isn't available in Silverlight (managed code support comes in 2.0 for mobile)

There are some guidelines for moving existing Silverlight applications to the mobile device.

• ScaleTransform (utility?) to resize content
• Use device supported encodings
• Avoid large content files
• Be aware of device resources
• Be mindful of scaled object size
• Mobile network connectivity is improving but you still have to take into account limited connectivity.
• Design apps for touch and non-touch input
• Design UI (XAML) for each form factor \

Roadmap (keep an eye on www.silverlight.net):

• Silverlight 1.0 for mobile CTP Q2CY08
• Silverlight 1.0 for mobile RTM Q4CY08
• Silverlight 2.0 for mobile CTP Q4CY08 (managed code support)
• Silverlight 2.0 for mobile RTM Q2CY09

Contact Amit (achopra@microsoft.com) via email to discuss TAP opportunities.

At the end they opened it up for questions:

• Reiterated the www.silverlight.net site as your one stop to get all information about Silverlight for developers, including what the optimum development environment would be (VS version, blend version, etc)
• When asked if Silverlight could interface with a camera built into a device, the answer was no. However, you could use/write an ActiveX control that interfaced with the camera or gps, etc, and as long as it's on the same page as the Silverlight application, you can exchange data. In 2.0, additional support for interfacing with the device may be made available thru the inclusion of managed code.
• Support for Windows Mobile 5? Not planned due to limitations of the browser.
• Silverlight 1.0 for mobile is the same Silverlight 1.0 as the desktop.
• Someone asked if there were any plans to go to a wpf (my word choice) style approach. The answer was that not for 1.0, but possibly in the 2.0 timeframe depending on customer need. Amit stated that they have been hearing quite a few requests for this, so there is another reason to email him and let him know if that's something that you want.