Microsoft: No native code for Windows Phone 7

15.03.2010
Microsoft officials Monday confirmed at the company's MIX 10 developers event in Las Vegas that native applications will not be allowed on Windows Phone 7 devices. Only applications running in the Silverlight runtime environment or games in the XNA Game Studio runtime will be allowed.

That was the answer by Todd Brix, Senior Director for Mobile Platform Services Product Management, to .

Brix confirmed that Windows Phone 7, the user interface overlay atop the , runs only interpreted or managed code through the two runtime environments provided by Silverlight and XNA.

Adobe, but not Microsoft, has announced it’s working on a version of its Flash multimedia environment for Windows Phone 7 . Microsoft has said, and Brix repeated today, that though the company has no objection to Flash, seen in part as a rival to Silverlight, the initial general release of Windows Phone 7 will not support it later this year. Questioned by Anderson, Brix declined to comment on how Adobe may be implementing Flash on the mobile OS if native code is not supported.

According to Anderson, the CE kernel has the necessary APIs, so the question becomes who will be allowed to access them and under what conditions.