Clint Rutkas and "Where's My Car" on Windows Phone 7

"Mango" is the code name for the upcoming release of the Windows Phone application platform. As you've no doubt read in countless other locations, there are lots of new features and capabilities being added in "Mango" which will benefit both users as well as application developers.
In this episode, I meet with Peter Torr, from the Windows Phone Application Platform Team to specifically focus on the new multi-tasking support that "Mango" will enable. Peter also shares a few details on his favorite feature of "Mango"—its ability to organize your contacts together in "groups," which makes it easier for you to keep track of, and interact with, the people important to you.
You can find more information about Multi-Tasking on Windows Phone "Mango" here:
Great conversation on the phone multi-tasking issues! Here are my minutes annotations on the video:
2:30 why multi-tasking support took so long? It impacts battery life & user experience.
4:13 why multitasking is hard on phone?
5:44 higher bar requirement for user experience on the phone
6:00 fast switching requires rebuilding app for Mango
7:20 difference between WP7 & Mango
9:00 how app runs in the background?
no GUI, 6Mb memory, cannot run 100% CPU for more than 25s
9:54 resources taken by the twitter demoed app
10:33 XNA doesn't support background agents
has a diff mechanism to play media (doesn't support random sound effects)
12:11 granularity of control the developer & user have on background tasks
12:30 background transfers, alarms and reminders are handled by sys
12:50 audio agents run all the time
13:15 flavours of generic background agents
1. periodic agents
2. resource intensive agents (run in night stand mode)
run in round robin fashion every 10 min (e.g. for data syncing)
14:55 demo of background agent management
app cannot turn on its agent on if user doesn't want it
1740 location aware feature
18:00 battery draining issue
19:03 Mango favourite feature: groups
Thanks for doing the summary George! A couple of clarifications; sorry if it wasn't clear:
1) Agents are limited to 25s, but they won't be getting 100% CPU (unless the phone is otherwise idle). We do ensure they don't starve, but it is a low amount of CPU
2) XNA applications can have agents, but those agents can't use XNA libraries. So, for example, an XNA game can use an agent to update its tile... it just can't use 3D, SoundEffects, etc.
3) Audio agents run all the time while they are playing audio; if you pause the audio, they are terminated after ~10 mins.