Stop the presses!  I’ve got some news.  The great team at GDGT is coming to Seattle, and they are having a bit of a party and meetup.  There should be a great deal of nerdosity going on there, which is awesome in its own right.  This will be further accentuated by the fact that the Windows Phone 7 team will be there to show off some devices.

Under normal circumstances, that would be pretty cool.  However, we’re not in the “pretty cool” business here.  I think I have made it clear, we are in the epic shit business.  Apparently, the nerdosity is expected to flow especially high at this event, and the request was made for the developer platform team for Windows Phone 7 to make an appearance.  Challenge thrown down.  Challenge accepted.  Challenge contorted into something all together different.

Since announcing the email alias to which you can send your device requests (about 2 weeks ago), we’ve been blown away by the response.  We’re still making our way through those requests, getting them into a CRM system and assigning them to our field evangelists.  That’s a tale of logistical complexity for another day.  However, the whole point of having preview devices is to get them into the hands of developers, right?  So we have two things to share.

First, if you are a developer in the area, and want to come to the event, bring your laptops with your Windows Phone 7 XAPs.  We will have phones on site to which you can deploy your code.  You can see it running on a real Windows Phone 7.  You get to share it with the crowd.  That’s not bad, but certainly not epic.  No, no.  Epic is in reserve for those true hackers who show up with the goods.  For those who have got the best XAPs, we are bringing a couple of phones with us, and some developer agreements to sign.  That’s right…the “A” gamers will be walking out with phones on which to continue their coding.

Are you game?  Spread the word, and see you there.

In the last couple of days since Andy’s announcement that all employees would get free Windows Phone 7s, we’ve seen a lot of buzz about the offer, including some around why we were doing it.

So why did we do it?  Put simply, we did it for the employees.  If you speak to any software developer or hacker, they will tell you that they love writing code.  They love solving problems.  They love creating things.  They love sharing their work with their friends and peers.  They love the satisfaction of seeing something work on a screen.  Unfortunately, when you work for a company, most of them generally have pretty stringent rules about moonlighting, and the ownership of IP.  For software companies, this usually includes code and side projects.  Microsoft is no different.

With this new mobile app era upon us, the Windows Phone team felt it important that we enable our own employees to participate.  There are so many talented, technical people at Microsoft.  It’s not just professional software developers…many Microsofties love coding, and they work on projects in their spare time.

We believe most Microsofties want to write apps for Windows Phone 7.  Before last week, and the changes announced in our policies, they couldn’t.  They would not have been able to profit from those projects.  We made these changes specifically to address the desire of our own employees to express themselves in code in the app marketplace.  A funny thing happens when you remove friction and barriers among a group of creative people.  I can’t wait to see what they create.

The internal response has been overwhelming.  I can’t count the number of languages in which we heard “thank you” while at our global sales summit last week.

I cannot believe I have only been working on the Windows Phone 7 team for three months.  So much has happened, it feels like a lifetime.  What’s been most impressive to me has been the pace of the engineering team.  Considering how many technologies from across the company we are bringing to WP7, it’s absolutely amazing what they are doing.

This week, during Andy Lees’s keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, we announced that the Windows Phone Developer Tools have gone BETA.  Beta means that we have a near final version of the tools for building apps and games for Windows Phone 7.

I wanted to share with the community just how excited the developer community has been.  As a data guy, I like numbers because they tend not to lie.  Since the Mix10 release in March of the first CTP tools (and then the refresh in April), we have seen over 200K downloads of the Windows Phone Developer Tools.  That was before we shipped a Beta, and certainly before we had 5M devices in market to fuel demand.  At some point we’ll release the Beta download numbers, but based on the number of people registered for the live training course next week (hint: it’s got a comma in it), there’s a lot of people who want to build apps for Windows Phone 7.

For me, that’s a pretty solid indicator of the excitement levels, how much our developer community is anticipating getting involved with WP7, and that it is time to get serious about building apps and games, or building out your business, for Windows Phone 7.  The opportunities are plenty, even if you don’t want to build apps.  We showed one of our partners, Preemptive Solutions, on stage at WPC showing how they are building analytics tools so that app developers can build better apps.  Get creative, and start building.  Stay nerdy my friends.

There was a story which surfaced yesterday about vulnerabilities exposed in a wide swath of Android apps.  SMobile Systems conducted research in the Android app space and found that some 20% of the apps allow third-party apps to gain access to sensitive or private information.

It would be easy to dismiss this article by pointing out that by simply downloading an app, a customer is making a explicit allowance to an app to access data on the phone.  What I found troubling about the findings wasn’t necessarily the point about access to the data, but rather that, 5% of the apps surveyed could make calls and 2% could send premium SMS messages.  Talk about a surprise cell phone bill.

The key word in the above statements, however, is “could.’”  Yes, customers make the decision to download those apps, but they have no way of knowing with certainty what those apps are doing behind the scenes.  UPDATE: Ben points out below that the customer us warned of all the APIs used, which is true, but they aren’t told *how* they are used.

Further, because of the multi-tasking architecture of Android, the apps have the potential to be doing a bunch of bad things in the background when the phone is not in use.

Google has been quick to point out that the architecture of Android would limit what actual damage one of these apps could do, but that’s really not the point.  What is being lost in this discussion is that there is no curation of the Android marketplace.  For all the grumbling and grousing about the Apple AppStore, their review process would likely catch these abuses.  There is no such level of certification for the Android marketplace.  Customers don’t want to think about needing anti-spyware software for their phone, as the article implies is one solution for Android.

The Windows Phone Marketplace certainly believes in the curation model, and we have placed user security as a top priority.  This is one of the main reasons that we have our app certification process, and why (UDPATE: “at least in version 1”) apps are run in sandboxes, with no access to any data other than its own isolated storage, or the ability to communicate with other apps.  UPDATE: The goal is to ensure that absolute best customer experience when using their phone.

UDPATE 6/25/10

I’m not one who believes in conspiracy theories or anything, but I do find the timing of this announcement from Google that they can remotely wipe apps from phones a bit curious.  I have to go do some digging, but I’d be interested to know if the Android developer agreement has specificity about what would constitute grounds for a remote wipe.

Well, there’s an old adage that you should be careful what you ask for because you might just get it.  The avalanche of emails and phone calls looking for developer devices was a welcome development.  There are some out there who think that we might as well pack it in on this whole mobile thing.  Developers, however, know better.  New markets == new opportunities for big ideas to break through.

I personally have seen, erm, a surge in the amount of email I get on a daily basis, thanks in no small part to Long Zheng.  I love that there are so many developers with so many great ideas wanting to get phones, and I particularly love all the electrons being harmed to fill my inbox.  My email is the one that’s out there [brwatson (at) microsoft], but there’s a whole team of evangelists who will be getting the phones to developers.  I’m just acting as a switch, and have been fortunate enough to be something of a public face.  We’re still working on the specific plan details for devices going out next month, but we wanted to lay out some principles for how we are going to actually get phones in developers’ hands, as well as what we are hearing from developers.

First, we are going to prioritize for apps being built by large and small teams, which represent some pretty big ideas, specifically targeting the launch timeframe.  At Mix10 we showed a pretty long list of partners, and we have continued to add to that over the last few months.  Second, as some of you may have heard, we are getting phones to our existing published Windows Phone Marketplace ISVs.  There’s several thousand apps and companies who are part of the 6.x marketplace, and we want to help jump start their transition to Windows Phone 7.  Finally, we are prioritizing for those committed developers who are building apps for Windows Phone 7 and sharing their knowledge about Silverlight, XNA and Windows Phone 7.

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