This blog post shall serve as my semi-official request to receive a Windows Phone 7 development device from Microsoft. So, why should I receive one of these devices? The reasons are quite simple.

I think I can safely say that, to date, I've not really released anything that I could consider popular. Things like The Vista Syn are useful tools for a very limited audience. That's exactly what I expected when I released ArkSwitch, a finger-friendly Windows Mobile 6.5.1+ task manager. After all - it's a task manager, which there are plenty of out there; for an unreleased version of WinMo; and it doesn't even have the coolest features of other task managers, like taking over the X button.

Well, that's not entirely how it happened.

Recently, a leaked version of .NET CF "3.7" has surfaced on XDA-Developers. I decided to take a look at it to see what's different. Unfortunately, only the mobile runtime is available, so no easy access to development tools. However, that doesn't stop Red Gate's .NET Reflector from peeking at the insides of a lot of these DLLs.

I was looking through some files in the leaked Windows Mobile 6.5 ROMs floating around the wonderful XDA-Developers site when I stumbled upon what looks like an Outlook Mobile help file. That file mentions Exchange 2010 and some fascinating new features. The two features that are of particular interest are SMS syncing and sending SMS messages from inside Outlook and OWA.

For some time, I've been considering writing my own UI framework on top of .NET CF as a more attractive, as well as more functional and extensible, alternative to WinForms. WinForms controls in Windows Mobile are limited, especially in the context of .NET CF. The biggest limiting factor concerning their attractiveness is the fact that controls simply do not support transparency natively. Sure, there are ways of doing certain types of transparency when drawing, but there are no good ways of implementing that on top of individual WinForms controls. That is why I have really wanted to write my own framework for this.