Inside Windows Phone #33 | Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh & 60% more Opportunity!

Posted: Mar 08, 2012 at 11:09 AM

By: Larry Lieberman

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2 Comments

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This week we spoke to Dev Plat Program Manager Mike Battista about how we extended the great Windows Phone experience to run on more affordable hardware, and what it means for software developers.

And what does it mean? Tremendous new opportunities!

Given these changes, we felt you would like more information about exactly what we did to accomplish this, and what YOU can do in order maximize the impact of your applications on these new devices.

Here are some more links to relevant additional materials on this release:

Joe Belfiore on the Windows Phone Developer Blog, about "Getting ready for 60% more customers"
Mike Battista on the Windows Phone Developer Blog, about "Optimizing Apps for Lower Cost Devices"
Download the CTP of the new update to the Windows Phone SDK, (7.1.1), on the MS.COM download center.
Pratap Lakshman on the Windows Phone Developer Blog about "Memory Profiling for Application Performance"
Our official Windows Phone Developer Documentation on "What's New in the Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 Update CTP"
Windows Phone Application Certification Requirements: http://wpdev.ms/certreq
The new Nokia Lumia 610, on Nokia's web site.

If you have any questions, let me know!

@larryalieberman

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The WebBrowser control is still supported and the performance on lower-cost devices is on par with the performance today.

The guidelines surrounding the WebBrowser control are more warnings about running out of memory than harming performance.

IE can consume a lot of memory when rendering complex websites. This is true even today.

The WebBrowser control essentially embeds IE in your app, so if you allow users to navigate to arbitrary complex websites in your app, the memory that IE uses will be attributed to your app. This could result in your app running out of memory if the sum of your app's memory usage plus IE's memory usage exceeds the recommended 90MB limit.

If you'd like to use the WebBrowser control, just be mindful of the content that users are allowed to load. If the content isn't very complex, then performance/memory issues shouldn't be a concern.

If users can load complex content in the control and your app footprint is already large, you may want to consider using the WebBrowserTask on 256MB devices to reduce the memory usage inside of your app.

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gaurav.net

Mar 09, 2012 at 12:15 AM

The guidelines suggest not to use WebBrowser control inside apps, does that mean all news related apps in "news+weather" category will have really poor performance on new affordable devices?
Mike Battista

Mar 09, 2012 at 10:00 AM

The WebBrowser control is still supported and the performance on lower-cost devices is on par with the performance today.

The guidelines surrounding the WebBrowser control are more warnings about running out of memory than harming performance.

IE can consume a lot of memory when rendering complex websites. This is true even today.

The WebBrowser control essentially embeds IE in your app, so if you allow users to navigate to arbitrary complex websites in your app, the memory that IE uses will be attributed to your app. This could result in your app running out of memory if the sum of your app's memory usage plus IE's memory usage exceeds the recommended 90MB limit.

If you'd like to use the WebBrowser control, just be mindful of the content that users are allowed to load. If the content isn't very complex, then performance/memory issues shouldn't be a concern.

If users can load complex content in the control and your app footprint is already large, you may want to consider using the WebBrowserTask on 256MB devices to reduce the memory usage inside of your app.

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