Sneak preview: Catel and support for Windows Phone 7 Mango

Since version 1.4, Catel fully supports the MVVM implementation of Catel for Windows Phone 7. Just after releasing Catel 1.4 (actually, the same evening), Microsoft announced the availability of the Mango SDK. For the ones that are unfamiliar with Mango: it’s the new big Windows Phone update that upgrades the framework to use Silverlight 4 instead of Silverlight 3 for Windows Phone development.

One thing that I missed in the Windows Phone emulator was the option to simulate the location service (GPS). When Microsoft showed that they implemented support for simulating the accelerometer and the location services, I was more than happy. However, what about the compass and gyroscope? No word about those sensors (which you want to simulate as well, right?).

When we as development team for Catel heard about the new Mango SDK, we immediately started implementing support for this new framework. One of the things we decided to build was a test implementation for every sensor available on the Windows Phone 7 device. This way, you can simulate all sensors in the emulator on your development machine in an MVVM manner.

Below is a video that shows how this actually works in the emulator and shows the differences between the Mango tools and Catel.

The demo application is already committed to the source control of Catel, so if you can’t wait until the official 2.0 release, you can already grab it here.