Abolade Gbadegesin: Inside Windows Phone "Mango"
- Posted: Jul 05, 2011 at 9:46 AM
- 65,383 Views
- 27 Comments
There have been a lot of positive reviews of the upcoming Windows Phone 7 OS release, code named "Mango." This release is a big one. It contains over 500 new features (and over 1000 new APIs), is full of improvements - from the core OS to the performance of UI scrolling - and "Mango" puts the user in control of almost everything the system has to offer.
"Mango" represents some impressive engineering. Since this is Going Deep, we are necessarily interested in the system-level improvements inside the Windows Phone operating system (in addition meeting a key engineer behind it).
Two new core or system-level features in "Mango" are a generational garbage collector and support for multitasking, or the ability to concurrently run application processes in both the foreground and background. GGC and Multitasking are going to be great for developers and users alike.
How does multitasking in "Mango" work? How is it designed? Lot's of great user features, but what about improvements to the developer experience? Let's ask the great Abolade Gbadegesin—a stellar software engineer (writing mostly C++ 
-> go native!) and key contributor to the Windows Phone operating system, application services, and overall "Mango" platform architecture—to get some real answers.
Tune in.
Comments Closed
Comments have been closed since this content was published more than 30 days ago, but if you'd like to continue the conversation,
please create a new thread in our Forums,
or
Contact Us and let us know.
More episodes in this show
-
Mohsen Agsen - C++ Today and Tomorrow
-
Abolade Gbadegesin: Inside Windows Phone "Mango"
-
Bart De Smet: Interactive Extensions (Ix)
Follow the Discussion
Oops, something didn't work.
What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in. You need to be signed in to Channel 9 to use this feature.What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in and view them all on your notifications page.sign up for email notifications?
This video explains unanswered questions and a lot more, very informative.
Best WP7 features:
#1 Responsiveness
#2 Removing headphone --> Music pauses
#3 Metro design language
Worst WP7 features:
#1 Read mail, delete it --> Shows as unread in Outlook
#2 Inability to hide Live contacts and feeds
#3 Inability to sync text messages to Exchange
WP7 already properly does show deleted mail in the appropriate Deleted Items folder. I use it everyday with Exchange Online and it works as expected. Perhaps you are using both WP7 and Outlook with some other obscure email server because itn Exchange it works for me as expected.
If the IM came from Lync Server or Lync Online, it does archive it and this is not the same as IM with your wireless carrier account. Perhaps the latter will sync to the Windows Phone Live account.
This is on Exchange 2010. Steps to repro:
1. Get an email (shows both on the phone and Outlook)
2. Open it on the phone, delete it
3. Check outlook, it'll show "Deleted Items (1)" with the newly deleted item being unread when I read it on the phone.
By the way another nice video. Hope Charles goes deeper (kernel stuff, ...) in the future with Abolade. He's great at explaining things!
You'll see Abolade on 9 again.
C
@Simon:
I just got my phone hooked up to our Exchange server and I have the exact same issue with deleted emails, they are all marked unread even after opening them before deleting.
Well done, Abolade. Clear and deep enough to add a new level of appreciation for not only the Mango release but for the new use cases for application developers going forward.
Kudos.
Excellent Abolade! On the next one, just start at the whiteboard because you did a fantastic job diagramming and describing the subsystems!
Cheers,
Horus
This one is fixed in Mango
Sorry it's not multitasking, stop calling it that.
@Simon:This issue also occurs with Hotmail and Gmail accounts (using Exchange ActiveSync Protocol). The worst part about it is that with Gmail archiving, it continues to show the message as unread in the your account until you manually mark it read. I reported this nearly 6 months ago via @winphonesupport. I was told that they would pass it on to the Windows Phone Team. This has been an issue since the Windows Mobile days. With everyone at Microsoft presumably using Exchange for their work e-mail, I really don't understand how this bug has slipped through the cracks for so long. Regardless, I hope Mango includes a fix for it.
@xpxp2002 The Mango preview still shows the same behaviour. It too annoys me since the earliest Windows Mobile days...
@Simon:That's disappointing. I guess we'll have to keep hoping for a fix in Tango...
@james vond: OK James.......
C
It would be interesting to see some of these "consumer electronics" concepts considered for introduction in desktop Windows.
What would Windows kernel team have to say about admission control and bounding boxes, giving only those promises that particular device can keep?
Phone is more restrictive that general purpose OS, but when I have a full screen app running in desktop Windows, why should there be others interfering with resources I need for it?
Waiting for a similar deep dive with Windows kernel team ;).
Great interview Charles. Looking forward to more from Abolade!
By the way: You can vote for the deleted-item-unread-issue here: http://windowsphone7community.uservoice.com/forums/84435-feature-feedback/suggestions/2002435-keep-deleted-email-as-read?ref=title
I asked C9 to have Abolade Gbadegesin give more WP talks, and you delivered. There's a handful of engineers like Abolade, Chris Brumme (BTW, can you get him to talk about what he's doing?), and Anders who really convey the information, but also make it feel like they're talking to you personally. Great video.
@Ken Jackson: Thanks. (And thanks @DaveDev).
Chris Brumme probably won't reappear on C9 for quite some time, if at all (I'm not sure he really likes to be interviewed on camera...). We only got him once and that was way back in 2004 - > http://channel9.msdn.com/search?term=Chris+Brumme (most of these old clips are download-only medium quality WMVs - no inline streaming or other formats available for downloading....).
C
I have two questions regarding the multitasking model:
1. How do you implement such a "run tracker"? Which agent type can be used? I think the scheduled task/peridic task is not working because it only runs all 30 minutes and can't access the gps. Correct?
2. How to implement background uploader that takes some minutes to upload and will be started after an application switch. Is it possible to do it only in battery-charging mode & wifi on?
Great talk. Thanks much. Where can we go to file bugs/ideas? I'm running mango as a dev, meant for us to work on our apps, but I'm sure you'd love to hear some of our feedback.
@Dark_Halmut: There is no Connect for WP7 Dev, right?
You could send detailed technical feedback to the C9 team (Contact Us). Use a subject like WP7 Mango Dev Feedback. We will send it to the correct person on the WP7 dev team. I'd be happy to do this for any of you out there with detailed technical feedback/issues/suggestions. Now, let's keep this to Niners as I am not a product feedback service.
Alternatively, you could spin up a thread in TechOff that we ask the WP7 people to monitor. It's up to you. Just let us know.
C
@Charles: Thanks. I did some digging and also found this site for feature requests.
http://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/110705-app-platform/topics/111325-how-can-we-improve-the-wpdev-application-platform-/filter/top?page=1
@Rico:1. for now the resource requirements of run tracker apps are unique enough that you're better off building them as foreground UI apps that run under the lock screen. since music can go into the background with Mango, this means you can still have a run tracker & audio playback running predictably & simultaneously.
2. for background transfers in Mango, we actually provide a built-in service that will handle the upload/download for you. take a look here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh202953(v=VS.92).aspx">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh202953(v=VS.92).aspx
and here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.phone.backgroundtransfer.backgroundtransferservice(v=VS.92).aspx">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.phone.backgroundtransfer.backgroundtransferservice(v=VS.92).aspx
Thank you Charles, and thank you Abolade.
Excellent video. I share your enthusiasm you have for the product.
Great work. I'm running Mango dev preview and I think the team did a fantastic job.
++
"This is your natural habitat"
Remove this comment
Remove this thread
close