Windows Phone 7 apps are Silverlight, lets run some DeepEarth

At MIX10 yesterday Microsoft announced the developer story for Windows Phone 7, Silverlight and XNA. I couldn’t help but take an hour last night to see if I could could get Bing Maps Silverlight running. Unfortunately that didn’t get far, you see it is not the complete Silverlight 3 package we run in today’s browser. Notable:

• No Browser, these are native apps so if you rely on Browser functions your DLL will not run. The current Silverlight Bing Maps control was not going to work today.
• No pixel shaders and some other goodies.
• Extra bits for interaction and cool phone functionality.

So after downloading the complete developer package to an old laptop I set to work to quickly see if I could get the DeepEarth map control and providers up and running.

The OpenStreetMap provider.

NearMap.

So we will need to do some cleanup of our code, mainly support for the new mousewheel event rather then use the browser events and removal of the design time check based on the html page. Lastly some integration with the users location and of coarse the new interaction model should make this a good environment to prototype until we see an update from the Bing Maps team.